I’ve steered clear of politics on here for a long time. Firstly there are better, more informed and more committed political bloggers out there, and secondly I don’t have the time or inclination to firefight arguments in the comment thread and fact check everything I write. But sometimes…
George Galloway – the Scottish ‘Respect’ MP is someone that people generally these days know because of his leotard-wearing I’m-a-pussy-cat appearance on Celebrity Big Brother a couple of years ago. That’s a pity, because it has distracted attention away from the fact that he is an utter, utter cunt.
I expect he’s probably something of a folk hero to a lot of people because he was very outspoken in his opposition to the Iraq war and thus found a populist touchstone on which to build a profile for himself.
He hails from a long and dishonourable strand that has tainted the Left in British politics for decades. From the principled opposition to free-market capitalism that formed the bedrock of socialism grew a reflexive dislike of the country most associated with free-market capitalism: the USA.
Over the years, this became a prism through which every geopolitical issue could be viewed. Russia was the future – even as millions were being sent to their deaths in the gulags and an entire continent was subjugated to cultural and economic ruination. Why? Because it was in opposition to the USA. So it was with Cuba… Vietnam… and almost any geopolitical issue you care to name since the end of WWII – regardless of the rights and wrongs. And nowhere more so than the issue of Israel.
This isn’t the place for a history lesson or to rehearse the rights and wrongs but the anti-US sentiment that has been current is now so entrenched in parts of the political spectrum that intellectuals, journalists, thinkers and men of principle have found themselves amongst strange allies. As the USA has been a staunch friend to this tiny Jewish enclave (set up, lest we forget, in mitigation for the horrors of the European holocaust) so it is that it has become a running sore to the Left – who somehow see in Israel’s existence proof that the USA is imperialist or racist.
And that’s just putting the best gloss on matters. Because it is no co-incidence that Israel is the world’s only Jewish state - “a small Hebrew idea in the desert” as Normal Mailer described it. And amongst all the horrors of the world, with Somalia and Chechnya and North Korea and Darfur and Kashmir and Iran they only have eyes for Israel. The kangaroo court of the UN, populated by the likeminded, gleefully passes resolution after resolution against Israel until the media and the man in the street sees the Israeli/Palestinian question through their prism, and the BBC can without blushing, call their coverage ‘balanced’ – as if there is a moral equivalence between an organisation that hides among civilians to launch terror attacks on a democratic state and such a state that defends itself against those attacks.
So taking the phrase “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” to it’s illogical conclusion, these liberal, white, educated, wealthy Westerners stand alongside proudly medievalist, theocratic, homophobic, misogynistic and – most pertinently – anti semitic allies in their opposition to Israel’s existence.
Galloway is merely the latest incarnation of these thread. A man who loudly proclaims that US/UK foreign policy is rooted in imperialism and racism while standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Hamas – an organisation that among its founding tenets includes this statement:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
The bloggers at Harry’s Place – one of the best and most informed political blogs in the UK – are now being threatened with legal action by this pulpit bully and one of his henchmen. The reason? The blog has relentlessly exposed what Galloway is, what he stands for and the nature of the company he keeps. Hamas is an anti-semitic organisation whose representations for Palestinians is merely a figleaf for their broader agenda.
They want the Jews dead.
If you want the likes of the people at Harry’s Place to be silenced by the threat of legal action and ‘libel’ from such people, then your silence will help them most kindly. Even if you think that Galloway is right, he cannot be allowed recourse to libel law to silence bloggers who are doing nothing but tell the truth. He made a big point on Big Brother about ‘speaking truth to power.’ Remember that now.
Very well said.