Joe Hack

Well at last a British or American politician has been censured over the bloody fiasco of the Iraq war. Wait a minute though. Its George Galloway, the UK Respect party MP who’s been one of the wars greatest critics and a constant thorn in the side of the Blair/Bush adminisrations. Hmmmm. Lets consider this. On the one hand we have Bush and Blair who are jointly responsible for lying to their respective countries, the death of over 600,000 iraqui civilians, turning a further 4.2 million into refugees, de-stabilising the middle east and making the word a far more dangerous place. They have escaped all official censure and in fact Blair has just been rewarded by being given the job of (you have to laugh) peace envoy to the middle east. On the other hand we have George Galloway, the maverick British MP who before the illegal invasion warned very graphically of its likely consequences and since then has led resistance in the UK to Blairs war. How strange. So far Gallloway is the only politician in the UK or the USA to be officially censured for his actions. Not Bush. Not Blair. Not a single one of the craven MPs or congressmen or Senators who looked the other way and supported the lies about WMD . I don’t think many ordinary people in the street are going to understand that. Do you ?

Very briefly indeed, George Galloway was a politician who knew about Iraq and had connections with it. He helped set up the Mariam appeal to help sick Iraqi children and campaigned against the allied sanctions which were killing thousands of them each year. That was essentially humanitarian and would have attracted very little interest had Galloway not committed the unforgivable sin of criticising the Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq and then carried on criticizing the ‘war’, providing a focal point for growing public unrest. Over the years since 2003 his anti-war stance has provoked vicious retaliation from the establishment. He has had to contend with what most people suspect have been dirty tricks run by the spooks (the ‘dodgey’ documents miraculously ‘found’ in Bhagdad), libellous comments from pro-war newsmedia (one of which he famously took to court and forced to apologise) and the notorious occassion when he voluntarily appeared before a US Senate committee chaired by the hapless republican senator Norm Coleman where the same tired slanders were repeated . They were expecting a polite ‘British’ politician who would tamely accept the hatchet job they intended delivering. They got a mean Scottish pit-bull instead. On prime-time TV and in front of millions around the world George absolutely wiped the floor with the shell-shocked Norm and his committee. He told them contemptuously to put up or shut up. They shut up. He was also kicked out of Blairs ‘New Labour’ party and immediately founded his own Respect party and beat the official labour candidate hands-down in an election. How George Galloway has survived the last few years is hard to imagine. Every dirty trick and smear that could have been used against him has been. He must be a very tough and determined man. Others have been killed or driven out of their jobs by the same treatment.

The latest episode in this long-running and shameful saga is that this week the obscure UK House of Commons standards committee has officially censured Galloway. In a voluminous report into his behaviour they have pawed over the same old ground again with as little success. They have been forced to accept that he has never personally profited by one penny from any of his activities in relation to Iraq. Reading between the lines, he has receieved a rap over the knuckles for the rumbustious way he has defended himself and fought back against the dirty tricks and slanders. Essentially the censure seems to rest on a technicality. He was criticised for not personally going into the financial background of every donor to the sick-child charity and the provenance of any donation they wished to make. Clearly that is a standard not required of anyone else in the country associated with a charity and one certainly not operated by the Labour government which is currently embroiled in a scandal over selling political honours for cash. If thats really all the establishment can come up with after all these years of trying, after crawling over every aspect of his life and finances, after trying to make his life a living hell, then its really … well its just pretty sad and pathetic, isn’t it ?

In the press this week you will no doubt read the usual hatchet jobs on George Galloway, the smears and the innuendo that have been part of his life for the last few years. But you need some balance. An opposing view. Surely thats what freedom and democracy is really about. None of us has the gift of total knowledge, but as far as any of us can tell and going purely on the evidence George Galloway is an honest man who has been persecuted for his opposition to the Iraq war. George Galloway has not said anything about the war, or about Bush or Blair, that is untrue as far as I know. Bush and Blair, on the other hand, demonstrably misled their countries with false and manipulated evidence with all of the tragic consequences we have seen. If the public had to believe just one of those three, I’m pretty sure I know which one most people in both the UK and the USA would trust. And the surname wouldn’t begin with a B.

-Tags:Blair Bush congress galloway george galloway Iraq Political Rants respect Uncategorized War war on terrorBlair, Bush, congress, galloway, george galloway, Iraq, Political Rants, respect, Uncategorized, War, war on terror

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