George Galloway and his merry band of fascists...

Important piece by Terry Glavin in today's National Post on George Galloway and his merry band of fascists...

It’s a royal headache, and you’d have to sift through CIDA’s voluminous “West Bank and Gaza” files to see for yourself how much Canadians are spending on aid and development in Gaza, but a cursory review reveals that among the Gaza-specific expenditures Canadians are currently supporting is a $4.1 million contribution to a UNICEF-run project for kids and an $8 million food-aid package for Gaza administered by the UN Relief and Works Agency, which appears to be on top of a $3 million food-aid contribution to Gaza through the UN and $1 million in food aid to Gaza through the Red Cross that Ottawa announced last January.

This, all by itself, should sufficiently expose the lie that Galloway’s Canadian activists tell about their aims to “break the seige” on Gaza. It should give you at least a clue as to what Galloway’s current Canadian tour is really all about. Despite his claims to the contrary, Galloway provides material, objective and propaganda support to Hamas, the worst tormentors of the Palestinian people. That is what his interventions in Palestine are for. It is what the various Gaza Flotilla spectacles are about, too.

The Foundation for Human Rights & Humanitarian Relief (IHH), the Turkish charity that partnered with the Cyprus-based Free Gaza Movement to launch last summer’s flotilla, is openly affiliated with Hamas. It is also part of an umbrella coalition headed by Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who says suicide bombing is wrong except when it targets Israelis, and even pregnant Israeli women are fair game. The flotilla’s other big sponsor was the Perdana Global Peace Organization. Its founder and guiding light is Malaysian strongman Mahathir Mohamad, who most recently asserted that European Jews “had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole governments to ransom. . . Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world.”

Galloway and the Hamas support network in Canada will tell you that 1. dealing with Hamas is necessary because 2. Hamas is the elected government in Gaza and 3. every aid agency must go through Hamas to provide humanitarian relief to Gaza’s Palestinians. That’s three lies right there. Here’s Galloway saying these very things to the CBC’s George Stroumboulopolis just last week. Galloway will sometimes slightly amend his self-exculpation by asserting that these are the reasons why he gave bags of cash to Ismail Haniya, the Prime Minister of Gaza (video here, with Galloway in his own words). This is also a lie.

The truth is that you don’t have to give bags of money to Hamas to provide humanitarian relief to the people of Gaza (there’s UNRWA, the Red Cross, UNICEF, etc.), Hamas is not the elected government of Gaza, and it is not true that humanitarian agencies have to give over to Hamas in order to operate in Gaza. Ismail Haniya is not the Prime Minister of Gaza, unless you want to airbrush from history the fact that Haniya was dismissed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas more than three years ago. You will also want to ignore the fact that Hamas then led a putsch that smothered Palestinian democracy in its crade by seizing Gaza and turning it into a statelet sponsored mainly by the Khomeinist police-state run from Tehran. Ignore as well if you like this Arab World for Research and Development poll undertaken last month which shows that Hamas enjoys the support of 12.8 per cent of the people of Gaza (.pdf).

Galloway and his friends have been allowed to get away with their dissembling not just because of the idiocy of certain currents on the “Left” in this country but also because of the laziness and self-serving purposes of Canada’s news media. Run blaring headlines proclaiming something as “fact” just once when it was really just Galloway’s own propaganda and you’re not likely to declare to your readers, ‘Sorry, but this two-bit blackshirt and his friends actually hoodwinked us.’ In a sadly typical and error-riddled account of a recent Galloway speech from just the other day, the reader is treated to the bowdlerism that Ottawa banned Galloway from entering Canada last year but the ruling was “overturned by a Federal court judge.” That is Galloway propaganda. The opposite is true. The judge found that Galloway was not banned and that there was no ruling for him to overturn, and consequently, Galloway’s lawyers had their claim dismissed.

“Liar” is a very serious word. So is “fascist,” and to allow that word to be reduced to an epithet is to allow the meaning of words to be so diminished as to utterly occlude our understanding of political phenomena and to render analysis to the level of name-calling. This is exactly how the same elements of the self-professed “Left” in Canada that serve as Galloway’s bag-carriers have reduced the perfectly respectable word “Zionist” to a mere pejorative, a term of abuse. I won’t be resorting to that sort of thing here. To situate the politics of George Galloway and his sundry Canadian public-relations handlers and campus venue-arrangers in the fascist category, one should have evidence, and mean what one says. I mean it. Here’s the evidence.

When I say Galloway provides material and objective support to Hamas, I mean the role he plays generally, but I also mean very specifically what George Galloway himself said he was doing, in his own words, when he handed Hamas those bags of cash. By “Hamas,” I mean that organization known to Arabic speakers as Harakat al-Muqāwamat al-Islāmiyyah, which can be translated as the “Islamic Resistance Movement” in Palestine. Hamas is an organization characterized by the classic tendencies of European fascism and animated by the precise traits of contemporary Islamist fascism.

Hamas is an antisemitic, political and paramilitary movement. It is violently opposed to liberal democracy. Hamas makes reference to the classic antisemitic fiction known as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in its very charter. Hamas suppresses dissent by violence and the threat of violence and looks forward to a “pure” future when its imagined homeland is cleansed of any religious, political or cultural challenge to its own version of a totalitarian Islamist hegemony. Hamas is the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Amin el-Husseini was slaughtering Jews and non-Islamist Arabs in Palestine in the 1930s, long before the state of Israel was born, with arms provided by the National Socialist German Workers Party, known to most of us as “the Nazis.”

In place of the Third Reich, Hamas nowadays is sponsored mainly by the Khomeinist tyranny in Iran, a regime that displays all the usual Euro-fascist and Islamist-fascist hallmarks, and which employs Galloway as a propaganda agent in his capacity as a celebrity presenter for the regime’s Press TV. Here’s Galloway on his Press TV show, powdering the nose of the holocaust-denying Khomeinist thug Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

To be fair, you’d have to look long and hard to find a tyranny or a fascist dictator of the Islamist or the Baathist kind upon whose boots Galloway has not slobbered. The Taliban “are not an enemy to me,” Galloway has admitted. Here he is sucking up to the clerical-fascist Hezbollah: “I glorify the leader of Hizbollah, Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.” Here he is lavishing praise upon Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” On Syria’s Baathist dictatorship: “Syria is lucky to have Bashar Al-Assad as her president.”

Galloway’s fascist rap sheet goes on and on like this, so we can stop right about here. But before we leave Galloway’s admiration of the Syrian regime entirely, his particular affection for the most outwardly and unapologetically fascist faction in Syria’s ruling coalition has a specific Canadian connection. It was four years ago this month that Galloway came all the way to Canada to attend a celebration of the 74th anniversary of the founding of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in Ottawa. The SSNP has its own distinctive swastika, its own Nazi-style uniforms and an anthem that’s sung to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles. These are the people George Galloway likes to party with.

If you don’t get it by now and you still fancy yourself to be all progressive and leftish when you go and give Galloway the standing ovations he craves, there’s no hope for you. If you read this and get it and continue to have truck or trade with Galloway and the cult he’s built around himself in this country, then you are my enemy, and all I will say to you for now is: Hey, nice boots.