Outspoken British MP and anti-war activist George Galloway lashed out at Canada’s foreign policy under prime minister Stephen Harper on Monday.
Galloway said that “Canada’s actions in Afghanistan are absurd because Canadian troops are killing Afghanis who are not necessarily Taliban fighters.”
“During the Vietnam War, there was daily coverage about how American forces had killed hundreds of Vietcong fighters. It was not until later when we found out that the alleged Vietcong fighters were just Vietnamese civilians,” he told a crowd on Monday, at Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church.
Having courted controversy throughout his political career, Galloway was ousted from Tony Blair’s Labour Party in 2003, after condemning Britain’s part in the invasion of Iraq.
In 2005, Galloway joined a new party, well to the left of Labour, called Respect. He is its sole representative in parliament, where he has continued to court controversy, by criticizing the Iraq war and missing certain parliamentary votes.
Earlier this year, he starred in the British television series Celebrity Big Brother. Last month, he launched a profanity-laced tirade at some questioning students after a debate at Oxford University.
By comparison, on Monday Galloway was rather subdued. He said that “because of its involvement in Afghanistan, Canada has thrown its reputation as a peacekeeping nation. And effectively, Canada’s PM Harper is now complicit in the Coalition of the Killing.”
However, he said that “as the fog of war has cleared, American, Spaniard and Italian populations have demonstrated through their countries’ election processes that they do not like Bush, Aznar or Berlusconi’s pro-war stances.”
“Bush, for example, was given the mother of all beatings in the recent primary elections.”
“Democracy inherently has variations. It is about progress and outcome,” said Galloway.
“As was the case in the Palestinian elections, not everything is Westminster-style democracy.”
He added that after “the Palestinian people elected Hamas as their political leadership through a democratic process, Canada’s Harper was the first to criticize and subsequently cut support to the Palestinian people.”
Galloway also expressed frustration at “Western media’s coverage of deaths and casualties of Western troops versus the [Muslim] civilian populations.”
He said, “[American, Canadian and British] dead have names that are memorialized, whereas, the Iraqi and Palestinian dead do not.”
“While we remember our dead, we do even not know the countless names from the other side. In fact, in Iraq now, we have reached a level which is beyond counting.”
“As long as the West props up puppet regimes in the Muslim world; does not disengage from Muslim lands and return Palestinians to their lands, there will be no justice and no peace and the on-going violence in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue.”
