It was difficult not to applaud Alykhan Velshi, an aide to the Minister of Immigration, when he announced that the government would not intervene in the decision of the Canada Border Services Agency to bar British MP George Galloway from entering Canada. The Border Service Agency has argued that Galloway offered financial support to Hamas, a terrorist organization by Canadian standards. Galloway, for his part, seems to accept this reasoning—if he had supported Hamas, he would not dispute the decision. However, he claims that he has never supported Hamas or any other terrorist groups.
No matter—Galloway has not been given his due. He has done far worse than lend support to Hamas. In October of 2005, the United States Senate published a report that presented evidence that Galloway’s “charity,” which campaigned against sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, had received direct funding from the Iraqi government. These funds were diverted from the Oil-for-Food program administered by the UN, and so stripped from the most desperately impoverished Iraqis. Paul Volcker, now one of President Obama’s chief economic advisers, chaired a separate UN inquiry, which found that Galloway’s wife had been paid a sum of $120,000. A second report produced by the British House of Commons was more damning (if that’s possible) and resulted in Galloway’s temporary suspension from the House along with calls for further inquiry.
Galloway has been, and still is, a hysterical political extremist, but that is no reason to keep him out of the country. His alleged complicity with the subversion of the Oil-for-Food program and collaboration with Saddam Hussein is. This program was intended to shelter Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens—children, the sick, the elderly—from the sanctions aimed against the Ba’ath regime. It is difficult to imagine a politician doing worse than accepting a direct inducement from Saddam Hussein, but Galloway, if the allegations are true, would have topped that by profiting from Oil-for-Food—stealing from the neediest to finance a propaganda campaign that blamed the West, in a twist of macabre irony, for the suffering of the poorest Iraqis.
Up until this point, Galloway has been rewarded for his behaviour. He became a darling of the Left after delivering a vitriolic harangue to the U.S. Senate in which he praised the courageous “resistance” of the likes of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq, tossing in lavish praise of the Assad dictatorship in Syria for good measure. For this, he was given a positively glowing profile in The New York Times, and showered with praise by the Daily Kos and The Nation. Stopping Galloway from entering Canada is not enough. While Saddam Hussein may no longer be around to roll out the red carpet for Galloway, there are plenty of regimes that will still offer him the royal treatment—and Canada should not be one of them.
