Straight-Shootin’ George Galloway
by Mike Whitney
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 6, 2005



 

“I am utterly against the punishing of innocent people for the crimes of the guilty, whether it is done on the underground of London or the streets of Falluja by George Bush’s air force.”

-- George Galloway, British MP

British MP George Galloway is quite a guy.

His trip to the Middle East is causing a ruckus back in London, where his criticism of Bush and Blair is appearing like a spreadsheet on the front pages of the tabloids.

Congrats, George, those two deserve a good lambasting.

Yesterday he fired off another barrage, landing a direct hit on Prime Minister Milquetoast and his Texas twin. He said, “There’s far more blood on the hands of George Bush and Tony Blair than there is on the hands of the murderers who killed those people in London.”

Ka-boom! Right on target.

Galloway was stellar, praising the Iraqi resistance as “martyrs” and telling them that they “are not just defending Iraq, but defending the whole world against American hegemony.”

Bull’s-eye.

Galloway’s comments drew attention to the young men who are swarming to Iraq to fight what he calls the “foreign invaders.” They’re normally disparaged by the pro-war crowd in the press like Tom Friedman who calls them a “jihadist death-cult”

What rubbish. Friedman should skip the name-calling and try to figure out who these guys really are.  Men don’t simply throw away their lives for no reason. It is the injustice of the American occupation that has the swollen the ranks of the Iraqi resistance.

Galloway knows that and so does Friedman when he’s not shoveling manure into the “paper of record.”

Imagine, for a moment, that the US was invaded by an army from Saudi Arabia for the transparent purpose of securing America’s great natural wealth. And, imagine that tens of thousands of American people were killed in that invasion, entire cities were leveled as reprisal for resisting, and scores of Americans were tortured and humiliated in the most despicable manner.

What type of man would risk his own life to travel to the United States to fight for the liberation of the American people from Saudi oppression?

A terrorist or a martyr?

Forget the media hype about suicide bombers targeting innocent Iraqis. Communiqués from the resistance have repeatedly refuted those claims saying they do not attack Iraqi civilians, only the occupiers and their collaborators in the Iraqi security services.

Who’re we going to believe, the Pentagon?

Galloway nailed it when he said, “These poor Iraqis, ragged people with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest most basic weapons -- are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day which has made the country ungovernable.”

Game

Set

Match.

Galloway can expect to be roundly throttled for his remarks, but the truth is out and can’t be undone. The Iraqi resistance is the frontlines in the war against American global domination. They’re doing the fighting in the trenches while Americans continue to stumble around in their perpetual state of amnesia.

Can’t Americans see their civil liberties being methodically savaged by Bush’s rubberstamp Congress? Will it take a decree of martial law to wake them up to this “gathering threat” emerging from the Bush White House?

We should applaud Galloway’s willingness to state the obvious: that the men who have taken up arms in Iraq are engaged in a life-or-death struggle against a neo-liberal cancer that is menacing the entire world.

Those who doubt what I say should consider Blair’s news conference yesterday, where he rattled off a whole new list of repressive measures to be directed at Muslims. Mimicking his Crawford mentor, Blair has decided that he has the right to unilaterally make law from his perch at 10 Downing St. without the consent of Parliament. The fatuous PM now claims the power to close down mosques, deport clerics and shut down web sites where the views don’t meet the dubious standards of the state. Additionally, Israeli trained police units have been deployed on London’s streets with orders to “shoot to kill” terror suspects (or fleeing Brazilians) if there is a perceived risk to public safety.

Who gave this unctuous, lying politician the right to declare martial law on Muslims?

Who gave this foppish phony the license to issue Nazi-type edicts that eviscerate basic civil liberties?

The British people would be foolish to let the wildly unpopular Blair get away with this monumental power grab.

85% of the British people already agree that the London bombings were the direct result of Blair’s involvement in Iraq. Similarly, every terrorist expert on the planet, including analysts at M15, the CIA, and the Israeli Mossad, have supported that very same conclusion. So, why should the victims of Blair’s bungled aggression be the same ones who are collectively punished?

It’s Blair who should be manacled and led away to the stocks, not the Muslims who already are suffering the blowback from his apocryphal war on terror.

No one in their right mind believes that Blair conjured up these new restrictions. His job is to simply recite his lines for the teleprompter and make sure his eye shadow and silk shirt are in order.

It’s the big-money elites behind Blair that have their sights on personal liberty, just as they do in America and Australia. (Australia’s Howard is trying to enact similar legislation right now) These are the three stooges of the international corporate-banking cabal, the tawdry courtesans of the global parasite-class.

Just listen to Zbigniew Brzezinski, founder of the Trilateral Commission, former board member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Co-Chair of the Bush National Security Task Force, and all-around foot soldier for American elites. Brzezinski is comfortably lodged at the very center of an elite cadre of nutcases who have been pushing for the New World Order (One world government) for over 20 years. His comments reflect the prevailing views of the main actors in the Bush-Blair-Howard governments.

“It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” (The Grand Chessboard, p.35)

“Too democratic”? “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.”?

Brzezinski hates democracy every bit as much as the men who back Blair. They’ve concluded that they can pretty well dispose of personal liberty in a few years by taking advantage of terrorist attacks, exploiting public hysteria, and crafting a media narrative that supports the crushing of individual freedom. That’s why we should take these new anti-Islamic laws for what they really are: a forerunner to the repressive measures that will be applied to everyone without discrimination in the very near future.

Can anyone seriously doubt this after seeing the pattern of the last five years?

That’s why we need guys like Galloway who’ll stand up and take a few hardy swings at the scoundrels in power. His words put a little steel in everyone’s spine -- and we’re going to need it, too. There’s plenty of bad road ahead.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state, and can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Related Articles

* Galloway Grills Senate and US Hypocrisy on Iraq by George Galloway
* Burying Blair: Post-Mortem for the British PM by Mike Whitney
* Tony Blair is Unfit To Be Prime Minister by John Pilger
* Time to Outgrow Our Naiveté by Ken Sanders
* A Viler Barbarism by Tariq Ali
* Making Sense of Terrorism by Kim Petersen
* Did Greenspan Know About the London Bombings Two Days Before? by Mike Whitney
* Cui Bono by Patricia Goldsmith
* Beyond Guilt and Innocence by Susan Van Haitsma
* Bush’s Orgy of Carnage by Mike Whitney
* Lest We Forget: These Were “Blair’s Bombs” by John Pilger
* A Thank You Note To The Murderous Bastards by Phil Rockstroh
* You Can't Say You Weren't Warned, Mr. Blair by Dilip Hiro
* A Distinction Without A Difference by Ken Sanders
* The Message from the London Bombings by Kim Petersen
* London and Madrid: Reflections on the War on Terror by Jack Random

Other Articles by Mike Whitney

* Pretty Hot in Crawford, Pretty Hot in Hell
* “Operation Community Shield”: Comrade Chertoff’s Preemptive Crackdown
* Kristallnacht: What Happens When the Public Says Nothing? 
* Burying Blair: Post-Mortem for the British PM
* “Withdrawal” from Iraq?: Forget About It
* The Globalization of State Terror
* Tom Friedman: Fabricating the Roots of Terror
* Doomsday: The Final Months of the “Housing Bubble”
* John Roberts and the National Security State
* Guantanamo: the Calculus of Human Misery
* Did Greenspan Know About the London Bombings Two Days Before?
* Another Casualty in Rumsfeld’s Information War
* Genesis of an American Gestapo
* Bush's Orgy of Carnage
* Goodbye to Sandra Day O’ Connor . . . and Good Riddance
* The Rumsfeld Solution: “Liberating Iraq, One Journalist at a Time”
* Show Your Independence on the 4th -- Burn a Flag
* "Up in Smoke": Bush Flops in Prime Time
* More Rumsfeld Lies About Insurgent Meetings
* Incinerating Iraqis: The Napalm Cover-Up
* Guantanamo: The New-World Icon
* The Bush Radio Address: More Delusional Blather While Iraq Bleeds
* The Friedman Solution: Reinstate the Draft
* Body Slamming the 4th Amendment
* Operation Desperation: Rumsfeld’s Baghdad Fiasco
* The EU Constitution: Don’t Believe the BS
* Protecting the Plutocrats
* What Was Laura Bush Doing at the Al Aqsa Mosque?
* Free Jose Padilla!
* Alberto Gonzales’ Kristallnacht: Purges for a Safer America
* Tom Friedman: The Imperial Chronicler
* Gods, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw
* A Tentative Strategy for Ending the War
* The Specter of Violence in America
* Free Speech in the Crosshairs
* Why America Needs to be Defeated in Iraq
* More Madness at the Bush News Conference
* Ratzinger’s Plan to Hide the Pedophiles
* Let’s Let Atheists Back into Politics
* Pope Ratzinger: More “Pie-in-the-Sky” for the Struggling Masses
* The Purveyors of Violence: The NY Times in Falluja
* Screw You, Paul Volker!
* Pope TV and the New World Media
* The Economic Tsunami: Sooner Than You Think
* Destroy Abu Ghraib!
* Terri Schiavo and the Battered Judiciary
* Railroading Moussaoui
* The Wolfowitz Appointment: A Red Flag for the Coming Wars
* “Economic Meltdown” -- Sorry, but We’re Toast
* John Bolton and the Road to Tehran
* Clearing the Way for the American Police State
* Challenging the Language of Violence
* Jose Padilla and the 10 Commandments
* Crushing the UN for a Stronger America
* Europe to Bush: “Hands Off Iran”?
* The Incredible Shrinking Dollar
* Assassinating Al-Hariri Fits Washington’s Plan
* Washington’s Plan to Foment Civil War in Iraq
* Condi’s Euro-Tour
* Folksy Tom Friedman and New Age Imperialism
* Government Without Consent
* The Desperate State of the Union
* Iraq’s Election Fiasco
* Boarding Up the “Window of Opportunity”
* KGB Chieftain Finds Home at Homeland Security
* Bush’s Grand Plan: Incite Civil War
* Pink Slips at CBS

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