As part of its ongoing mission to enrich the lives of U of T students, SAC, in collaboration with the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, has announced a special treat for students: a visit from British MP and anti-war campaigner George Galloway. Mercifully, no student money is being spent on this event, but the fact remains that SAC has put considerable time and effort into promoting this campus appearance. But who is George Galloway, and why should students be excited about his impending visit?
According to SAC, Galloway was “expelled from the British Labour Party in October 2003 for his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq.” This is actually an oversimplification. In fact, many Labour MPs opposed the war, but Galloway was somehow the only Labour MP expelled from the party for his stance. What made him so exceptional? Perhaps his opposition to the war was just that much more “outspoken” than, say, that of fellow MPs Jeremy Corbyn or Robin Cook?
The reality is that Galloway’s opposition to the war was so “outspoken” that he crossed the line from merely opposing the war to actually calling on British troops to commit treason and sabotage. He also called on Arab states to attack British and American forces in Iraq. In other words, he wasn’t so much “anti-war” as he was in favour of a different war, presumably a pan-Arab jihad against Bush, Blair, and (of course) the state of Israel. Galloway was not expelled for his opposition to the war, because if Blair had expelled every anti-war Labour MP he would nearly have lost his parliamentary majority, but rather for these other actions.
Clearly Galloway felt very strongly about keeping the regime of Saddam Hussein in power. That may seem like funny behaviour for an “anti-war” individual, since the Hussein regime had fought two wars of aggression against neighbouring states (Iran, then Kuwait) and committed genocide on its own soil, but you have to understand that for Galloway, it wasn’t just politics-it was personal. He had a very close relationship with the Hussein regime.
This beautiful friendship between two of the world’s notably moustachioed politicians began after the first Gulf War (which Galloway had opposed), when he began travelling to Iraq on a regular basis. According to Galloway, he undertook these voyages as part of an effort to bring about an end to the sanctions against Iraq (which, let us never forget, killed thousands of Iraqis while both the Hussein regime and the UN bureaucracy got fat off oil revenues). A noble cause, to be sure, but Galloway’s methods were a bit strange. For example, he met with Saddam Hussein in 1994 and-in front of television cameras-told the mass-murdering sociopath, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-Quds [until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem].” Note the implicit desire in this statement for an Arab conquest of the state of Israel.
The love affair between Galloway and Ba’athist Iraq didn’t end there. Galloway met on numerous occasions with one of Saddam’s longest-lived cronies, Tariq Aziz, and the two became such good friends that they spent Christmas together in 1999 and went disco-dancing on a different occasion. In the course of all these meetings they surely managed to do more than just fling woo at each other, yet Galloway seems to have been unsuccessful in achieving his goal of ending the sanctions or in any way changing the behaviour of Saddam’s regime.
So what did they talk about all that time? That’s anybody’s guess. The British Daily Telegraph suggested that Galloway was in fact meeting with the regime on a regular basis because they were his employers, but that matter is still in the courts. The newspaper based this claim on a memo found in the Iraqi foreign ministry by a Telegraph journalist suggesting Galloway was in the regime’s pay. [Galloway has denied these allegations, and has since won his libel suit against the Telegraph. – Ed.]
The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that Galloway was on good terms with a regime that had engaged in, to put it mildly, a whole lot of “oppression.” It therefore seems slightly odd that SAC should invite him as part of “Xpression against Oppression” week when he was clearly unable to “Xpress” the slightest bit of opposition to a regime that had killed, imprisoned, and tortured hundreds of thousands of people. To Galloway, this meant nothing, so long as he could build his career on his reputation as “a leading figure in the anti-war movement in Britain and around the world.” In reality, Galloway is a dishonest opportunist who only opposes wars by certain countries, and who enthusiastically supports wars in the name of Arab nationalism and other ideologies of victimhood.
This is the man SAC is bringing to our campus, supposedly to tell us all about the horrors of “oppression.” Who better to speak to that topic than a man who has stared the worst sort of oppression in the face and then denied its very existence?
