It’s almost treason, by George (Galloway)

UK Times ^ | Aug 7, 2005 | ROD LIDDLE

[veronica]

One important question that George Galloway has never answered is: which was Saddam Hussein’s favourite Quality Street chocolate? Galloway clearly knows but he has never told us. We can guess, of course — maybe it’s that triangular green one with the noisette centre. But you would like to have known for safety’s sake if you were a courtier of Saddam, wouldn’t you? Put your hand in the tin and take out the wrong chocolate and you might find yourself shoved head first through the paper shredder. Too late for such inquiries now. Galloway spent an agreeable few hours in Saddam’s company in his Baghdad palace while the maniac chomped his way through a tin of Quality Street. Galloway called him lots of nice things, including “indefatigable”. Or that may have been the Iraqi people. Hard to match up to “indefatigable” when you are cowering in a hole.

Now I worry that we will never know the answer because evidence is growing that the Respect MP for Bethnal Green is, these days, a few herrings short of the full shoal and must henceforth be classed as an unreliable witness.

One worries not so much about his political views, which might best be described as an agreeably nostalgic Stalin-lite. It is rather cheering to know that someone in this country found the destruction of the Soviet Union “utterly shattering”, rather than a cause for unrestrained jubilation. This hankering after a corrupt, vicious and incompetent totalitarian state is otherwise confined to a handful of university academics of whom nobody takes any notice.

Nor does one worry too much about his undeniable penchant for sucking up to fascist dictators — which is less paradoxical than it might at first seem. It is but a short hop from the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact to Galloway in Baghdad handing around the Quality Street and calling Saddam “indefatigable”. Stalinists are pragmatic.

And we should probably excuse Galloway’s regrettable John Lennon fixation. Imagine may indeed be one of the most fatuous songs ever written, but many people are enamoured of its saccharine charms.

The real reason for worrying about Galloway is the language he uses these days. He has started speaking in tongues.

On Syrian television he announced to a startled population the following: “Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners, Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help and the Arab world is silent.”

That’s not all. “These poor Iraqis,” Galloway said of the insurgents who have murdered British troops, “ragged people with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs . . . are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars.”

I mean, “with their sandals”? What has their choice of footwear got to do with anything? If you ask me, sandals seem appropriate attire for suicidal fundamentalist Muslims — better on hot, dusty roads than clumpy Timberlands, say.

Galloway has spoken a bit like this before. Ten months ago he announced on Arab television that Tony Blair and George Bush “will burn in hell in the hell fires”, which to my mind has the whiff of tautology about it. But these past few months it has got worse and worse. This absurdly florid, flowery, euphuistic language; the maniacal recourse to the most overstated, inappropriate metaphors and similes.

One assumes that he is speaking how he thinks Arab people speak and it has turned out like a sort of Ba’athist equivalent of Peter Sellers doing Goodness Gracious Me. But I’ve been up and down the Edgware Road in London and I haven’t heard Arabs speak like that. Meanwhile, most of Galloway’s constituents at home are Bangladeshi — and they don’t speak like that.

The only people I have heard using such language are on those dodgy videos on Al-Jazeera of bearded troglodyte Al-Qaeda recusants: in other words, Galloway is apeing the language not of Arabs but of the hardcore lunatics. Perhaps he has confused the two. He has become so caught up in his war against the war against terror that he has come to identify entirely with the terrorists and he assumes that everyone in a headdress feels the same way.

As you might imagine, most of the attention has focused on Galloway’s description of the suicide bombers, the people killing our troops, as “martyrs” — something that he has since denied. Liam Fox described Galloway as “sad, twisted and irrelevant”. But you wonder how far Galloway’s patent loathing of the British state now extends to all of its subjects as well. He can’t actually wish British soldiers — or crusaders, as he has helpfully called them — to be killed, can he? Or does he see himself heroically holed up in a cave in a pair of flip-flops wearing a green bandanna and clutching a metaphoric Kalashnikov? If that’s the case, George, go to it.

Even for someone who agreed with you about the war in Iraq and the deception perpetrated by our government to prepare us all for it — the latest stuff feels suspiciously close to treason. It is hard to know whether we should laugh at Galloway or hang him.

[veronica]

The way I read Tony Blair's new laws, Galloway could be deported for these traitorous remarks...

[Paleo Conservative]

Almost? I think he crossed that line years ago.

[Emmett McCarthy]

Actually I think Saddam and his sons put folks through the shredder feet first, not head first, so that they could savor the agony longer.

Galloway ought to be the first public hanging in Britain.

[veronica]

He's spewing like one of those mad imams Blair is threatening to deport. Let's see if those new laws have any teeth. He makes Cynthia McNinney look like a patriot.

And if course, he's got a US book deal.

Such traitors would have sided with Hitler, but FDR knew what to do with them. He would certainly not have allowed them to remain in the govt. He kept Lindbergh out of the war. Didn't trust him.

[mcg2000]

It's more an issue of what he says in the Muslim world.

btw - I'll have to listen to NPR on Monday ... I'm sure he's overdue for his weekly interview on the evils of the West.

[mcg2000]

It's more an issue of what he says in the Muslim world.

btw - I'll have to listen to NPR on Monday ... I'm sure he's overdue for his weekly interview on the evils of the West.

[Senator Goldwater]

It is hard to know whether we should laugh at Galloway or hang him.

What a priceless article. The Brits really know how to write a good harangue.

[Paleo Conservative]

It is hard to know whether we should laugh at Galloway or hang him.

How about laugh at him while he's being hanged?

[HawaiianGecko]

 

 

	"Galloway has spoken a bit like this before. Ten months ago he announced on Arab television that Tony Blair and George Bush “will burn in hell in the hell fires”, which to my mind has the whiff of tautology about it. But these past few months it has got worse and worse. This absurdly florid, flowery, euphuistic language; the maniacal recourse to the most overstated, inappropriate metaphors and similes." Galloway should be hung and this article is well written. However, to complain of "tautology" while in the next two sentences say "worse & worse" and then "florid, flowery" is enough to make one snicker a bit.

!

 

"Galloway has spoken a bit like this before. Ten months ago he announced on Arab television that Tony Blair and George Bush “will burn in hell in the hell fires”, which to my mind has the whiff of tautology about it. But these past few months it has got worse and worse. This absurdly florid, flowery, euphuistic language; the maniacal recourse to the most overstated, inappropriate metaphors and similes."

Galloway should be hung and this article is well written. However, to complain of "tautology" while in the next two sentences say "worse & worse" and then "florid, flowery" is enough to make one snicker a bit.

 

[Senator Goldwater]

How about laugh at him while he's being hanged?

Swinging on the Gallow's Pole.

[McGavin999]

It is hard to know whether we should laugh at Galloway or hang him.

Hanging him would be safest for the British people. Otherwise, he will continue to aid the very people who are blowing up innocents.

[WarEagle]

He kept Lindbergh out of the war. Didn't trust him.

That could be, but it was punishment more than lack of trust. He considered Lindy a "traitor to his class" for expressing his views that a war with Hitler would be the death of Western civilization, and knew that Lindy lived to fly. Keeping him out of aerial combat, which turned out to be the biggest development lab ever built for aviation, would be the most severe punishment Lindy could face.

[dighton]

A deft evisceration.

[steel_resolve]

You know, this is one of those well written artilces that when you read it you understand that the author has completely nailed the subject and left him no room to escape. Nice read.

[aculeus]

This absurdly florid, flowery, euphuistic language; the maniacal recourse to the most overstated, inappropriate metaphors and similes.

Euphuism, Affected elegance of language after Euphues, a character in Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England by John Lyly.

(For the benefit of any who, like me, needed an explanation.)

[mewzilla]

[MozarkDawg]

Put your hand in the tin and take out the wrong chocolate and you might find yourself shoved head first through the paper shredder.

I guess it's a good thing I have all my See's chocolates memorized, know which is what center ... thus avoiding the head-through-the-paper-shredder treatment.