Canada In Palestine, George Galloway In Canada, Fascists On Campus.
It would probably come as a surprise to most people to learn that Canada deserves credit for being one of the world's leading financial contributors to the cause of Palestinian freedom and a functioning Palestinian state. You'd never know it from reading the newspapers or all the posters on campus, but the sinister Zionist bogeyman otherwise known as Prime Minister Stephen Harper appears to have arranged for more money and aid to find its way to the oppressed and downtrodden people of Gaza than all the George Galloway fundraisers, "Viva Palestina" crusades and Gaza Flotilla spectacles combined, by several orders of magnitude.
Between 1993 and 2007, Canada spent roughly $400 million in the West Bank and Gaza, and in 2007 Canada committed another $300 million to be spent over five years. Harper's wicked Ziocon Hegemonists have built on this Canadian tradition and have provided significant amounts of humanitarian aid (worth several millions of dollars) over the past year or so, alone, specifically to the people of Gaza. Canada is just wrapping up a $12 million, five-year project to help Gazans cope with the economic losses due to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, for instance.
Prime Minister Harper has actually gone much farther then his predecessors. Last year, Ottawa caught a great deal of flack for deciding to break with the tradition of scatter-gun aid disbursements to concentrate 80 percent of bilateral resources in 20 "countries of focus." Much of the criticism may have been deserved, but one of those countries - in fact the only "country of focus" identified in North Africa and the Middle East - is the country Ottawa calls "West Bank and Gaza," otherwise known as Palestine.
Canada's focus on Palestine is well warranted. By such benchmarks as poverty, food insecurity, chronic malnutrition in children, and infant mortality, Palestine does not present a pretty picture. Its "human development" indicators put it at 110th place out of 169 countries, a tie with South Africa, better than Pakistan, India and Nicaragua, but worse than Egypt, Jordan or Turkey.
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.
Between 1993 and 2007, Canada spent roughly $400 million in the West Bank and Gaza, and in 2007 Canada committed another $300 million to be spent over five years. Harper's wicked Ziocon Hegemonists have built on this Canadian tradition and have provided significant amounts of humanitarian aid (worth several millions of dollars) over the past year or so, alone, specifically to the people of Gaza. Canada is just wrapping up a $12 million, five-year project to help Gazans cope with the economic losses due to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, for instance.
Prime Minister Harper has actually gone much farther then his predecessors. Last year, Ottawa caught a great deal of flack for deciding to break with the tradition of scatter-gun aid disbursements to concentrate 80 percent of bilateral resources in 20 "countries of focus." Much of the criticism may have been deserved, but one of those countries - in fact the only "country of focus" identified in North Africa and the Middle East - is the country Ottawa calls "West Bank and Gaza," otherwise known as Palestine.
Canada's focus on Palestine is well warranted. By such benchmarks as poverty, food insecurity, chronic malnutrition in children, and infant mortality, Palestine does not present a pretty picture. Its "human development" indicators put it at 110th place out of 169 countries, a tie with South Africa, better than Pakistan, India and Nicaragua, but worse than Egypt, Jordan or Turkey.
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.
posted by Terry Glavin at 4:37 PM
29 Comments:
I wonder which Human Development Indicators you used?
I usually refer to the UN one to point out that the Palestinians are of a par with their Arab neighbours - usually ahead of the non-oil ones but behind the oil states. This counters the commonly held belief that they live in abject poverty like the poor fly-ridden, pot-bellied Africans shown on TV.
This year's UN HDR does not rate Palestine whereas previous reports did. Strange.
I noticed that too. I used the same UN HDI that CIDA uses. The ranking of most countries appears to have gone unchanged since the previous year's index, and I know of no reason why Palestine's would have changed its relative position. Many Palestinians do live in abject poverty (I got a glimpse of it in the West Bank a few months ago) but certainly many do not, and most are doing fairly well; it's the radically uneven distribution of wealth (perhaps especially in Gaza) that distorts the PA's HDI indicators and GDP. Even so, Gaza is certainly not the "Warsaw Ghetto" caricature the Galloway cult would have us believe.
A clarion call Terry.
Nice boots, indeed.
Wow !
Such powerful article.
Thanks Terry - and it is very important to show the clueless leftards that Hamas was not "freely elected in a liberal democracy" as the fascist Galloway likes to put it.
What does Galloway know about democracy anyways? His incessant and insulting lies and support for fascist dictatorships all around puts the lie in his dastardly propaganda.
A tour de force, Terry.
When you think about it, it's hard to believe that even our so-called anti-imperialist lefties would make George Galloway their hero. He certainly ain't no che, and che was a nasty bit of goods himself. But Galloway? How can anyone hear "Saddam Hussein: I salute your indefatigability" and still respect the man?
I should have included that I wouldn't respect anyone who even uses the word "indefatigability," never mind uses it to praise that brutal hitman of a dictator.
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Just heard him speak in Yellowknife a few hours ago.
I am embarrassed to say how little I know of the Israel / Palestine conflict. That lack of knowledge is one of the reasons I went to hear him.
I was shocked at the lack of facts, logical presentations of points of view or even well founded arguments.
Very heavy on shock, inappropriate correlations, straw man arguments etc.
He's a good orator with some clever jokes, but his material is decidedly lacking - even I with my level of ignorance on the topic could smell something off.
I'm deeply troubled by the reactions of the audience and hope it was just Canadians being polite.
ps only 1/3 gave him an ovation.
Serious problems with the article: "Harper [gives more money to] people of Gaza." No. when Hamas elected: no aid to Gaza from Canada. Dealing with Hamas is necessary because Hamas is the elected government of Palestine including Gaza. Hamas won in a landslide in an election monitored by over 18,000 international observers. monitors. (According to a CSR Report for Congress, Feb 9, 2006.) According to the same report Hamas won 74 out of 132 seats.
Following the election CTV news reported
"Hamas sweeps to victory in Palestinian elections. CTV.ca News Staff. Updated Thu. Jan. 26 2006 11:50 PM ET"
Statement to CTV by Canadian monitors:The Canadian monitoring group?: "We characterize this election as very smooth and we certainly think it reflects the democratic will of Palestinians,"
Dealing with any elected govern. is necessary.
Aid to Gaza through Hamas? Hamas is the government. All governments ultimately control foreign aid. Who are we to impose our rules on a foreign government? Few support Hamas. Many support democracy.
Gavin cites lots of quotes from nasty people. Don't forget the nasty Zionist quotes.
Gavin rightly condemns Palestinian violence but forgets Israel's. One example:Tzipi Livni's parents were convicted terrorists for bombing and killing innocent people.
Why more hate?: Gavin: [listen to] Galloway...then you are my enemy"
Gavin's hate is adopted by readers who are uninformed. Sad. Gavin will dismiss everything in this post. I needed to say it anyway.
Gerry Hawke: Gavin either doesn't know his facts or he distorts them intentionally.
Glavin's expose is replete with links. Compare that to Galloway's non-existent articles and non-existence references. Read what Martin Campbell just wrote about the ignoramus Galloway.
Then you say Hamas was "elected". This is counter-factual. Not only Hamas killed many opposition candidates and prohibited campaigning, but also after it "won" a rigged election, it tortured and killed many Palestinians when it engineered a coup in 2006. This practice continues to this day. And then when their term expired, Hamas conveniently cancelled elections. That was the end of your so-called elections.
Only a total ideological blind would claim that "Hamas got elected". Obviously you are ignorant of the rules of democracy.
I will not bother to refute the rest of your nonsense as judged by the first two statements.
Gerry Hawke: Hamas won in a landslide in an election monitored by over 18,000 international observers.
Except that they monitored the elction process. There was NO campaigning and NO debates and NO opposition figures to Hamas or Fatah. No one was able to question why a dirty Islamic religious party should have the right to run in an election. Religion is separate from State and Hamas should be prohibited from participating in the elections because it is a theocratic faswcist party. That would be similar to if an evangelical church were to participate in the US elections or have members of the priesthood elected as representatives.
In no liberal democracy is members of the clergy allowed to run. It is called "separation of church (mosque) and state." But of course leftards are now all pro-religion.
So much for your "Hamas was elected in a democracy" nonsense.
Gerry Hawke: Gavin rightly condemns Palestinian violence but forgets Israel's.
Heh - this article is about aid to Palestinians, Galloway, and the fascist state in Gaza.
Nice trying to change the subject. And BTW Israel is a democracy where human rights are respected for all, and where there is freedom of expression and religion.
To compare Gaza and Hamas to Israel is so retarded. Only a leftard moral equivalent can make such a weasily claim.
Fact is that the Canadian government is giving tens of millions of dollars of food and other aid to a population whose so-called leaders don't seem to produce anything but hatred.
Galloway's $25,000 in a paperbag to Hanieh is so pathetic. Can't the leftards come up with more aid and put their money where their big mouth is?
sorry for the repeat posts
Gerry: Try to express an opinion or a criticism if you can manage it, but I don't need to take your gratuitous insults and ignorant backchat. This is your last notice.
Khalid,
I don't think Galloway is an ignoramus. Far from it. He is a clever man with an agenda.
Perhaps he shouldn't have left school at 16 as he so proudly boasts. It's like his brain is a book and he's missing a few chapters and an index.
Throughout his talk I was struck by how hard he was trying to seem reasonable, yet couldn't resist the shock factor. For example the claim that Canada is spending 1 Billion per month in Afghanistan.
He really lost me when he equated the loss of (how many?) thousands of lives at once on 9-11 with the individual losses of life in Afghanistan. Both are repugnant, but they are fundamentally different occurrences.
He also repeatedly insulted my country, insults I now discover are lies.
I want my $10 back.
Oh and he also claimed to have 1,000 or more attendees at each speech elsewhere in Canada.
I don’t think that the governments of Canada, the US and Israel are that concerned about the repressive religious fundamentalist, even fascist, nature of what the article calls “Islamism” in relation to Palestinian politics. (Just look at the installation/support of fascist dictatorships by the US around the world over the past 60 years, and Canada’s silent complicity – I include here overthrow of the democratic government in Iran the early 50s in favour of the Shah.) What these parties care about is which Palestinian faction is most likely to give Israel the best deal, and accept for Palestinians the smallest piece of the pie eventually in a two “state” solution, should some version of this ever come to pass.
That faction is Fatah.
The article points out – correctly enough – that there are other ways of providing aid to Palestinians besides supporting the faction that won the 2006 elections, which were widely considered to be fair and free. The article mentions about $16 million given by Canada to UN agencies and NGOs, out of a current bundle of several hundred million dollars for the focus country of “West Bank and Gaza”. It is no surprise this area has become a focus for the Harper government as its allies the US and Israel are scrambling to buy legitimacy for the faction they support. The remainder of the hundreds of millions Canada is spending (i.e., the vast bulk which does not go to NGOs or the UN) goes to the “Palestinian Authority” i.e., Fatah.
I have no doubt that Hamas makes the most of humanitarian aid it receives from Galloway and others to further its political ambition, agenda and claims to legitimacy (it would be surprising if none of the NGO money spent in Gaza went to support work of government – i.e., Hamas –ministries) . Likewise I have no doubt that Fatah, as intended, uses the billions provided to it by Canada, Israel and the USA better to establish its claim as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians.
Galloway claims to have given money and materials, not to Hamas, but to the government of Palestine, de facto government of Gaza. Glavin claims the humanitarian Harperites give our tax dollars to the “Palestinians”. It seems disingenuous, or at least one sided, for a writer of this calibre not to point out that the questions are the same in both cases – which Palestinians and why? In the case of Canadian, Israeli and US largesse, the purpose is to secure a compliant regime, not necessarily one which is democratically representative.
Mr Glavin. My first posts were unacceptable to me for that reason. I rewrote the post and intended to discard the offending post. For some reason the posts went through. I'll admit I don't know much about posting.
The post I intended to publish may contain statements in the last paragraph which could be considered insults. The statement was not meant to insult but was intended to comment on the level of hate increasing to an alarming degree. Some editorials seem to promote hate and fear. Most readers accept those opinions as facts because they aren't fully aware of the issues. I don't blame them. Alternate facts and opinions are seldom heard. I know the issues in depth. It's difficult for me not to respond. Most of my sources can't be discredited.
Lastly, your article contains many intensive insults not only directed at Galloway but at those agreeing with him. Free speech is precious to us all. I may vehemently dislike someone or their opinion but I'll defend his right to publically speak it.
David: "It seems disingenuous, or at least one sided, for a writer of this calibre not to point out that the questions are the same in both cases – which Palestinians and why."
No, not disingenuous, unless you try to make the facts fit with your theory that "compliant" is what we're looking for in the Palestinian leadership. A simple recognition of the existence of the Jewish state of Israel and a commitment to take the gun out of politics would do just fine; if you want to dimiss this as wanting a Palestinian leadership that is merely "compliant," go ahead, but leave me out of it.
I'm simply not going to go along with the charade that requires me to pretend that Gallloway and the flotillas and the Viva Palestina crowd are up to what they claim. They are not. They are a function of Hamas propaganda and the Hamas agenda to entrench itself as the one party of the one religion of the one-party statelet of Gaza.
This is the hideous "two-state" solution that results: A theocratic-fascist despotism in Gaza, and an incompetent and corrupt authoritarian statelet in the West Bank.
Blame the Israelis or the US imperialists for this as much as you like. It didn't have to be this way, but it's the way it is.
Gerry:
"Lastly, your article contains many intensive insults not only directed at Galloway but at those agreeing with him."
If all I've done is upset you and insult George Galloway and his sycophants then I clearly haven't done my job. You want to be upset? Suit yourself. Have a good cry.
"Free speech is precious to us all. I may vehemently dislike someone or their opinion but I'll defend his right to publically speak it."
Well, bully for you, aren't you the brave one. You should have a little medal for yourself.
Too bad you aren't so fervent about the free-speech rights of the Lebanese, the Iranians, the Syrians, the Afghans and the Palestinians, whose tormentors and abusers are Mr. Galloway's friends and sponsors.
Yes, I have a bred-in-the-bone contempt - hatred, even - for "liberal" know-nothings who accomodate, pander to, "respect" and travel with fascists.
Get over it, or get lost.
Am amazed that anyone in Canada would bother to listen to George. Heard him at a Respect campaign rally in London during a council byelection a few years back, in a predominantly Muslim riding I might add, and there was hardly anyone there -- and several of those present, including a crusty Irishman, were decidedly critical of what George had to say. George dismissed his critics as unworthy too, which is his standard modus operandi, along with the hyperbole and outright lies he espouses.
The Lib-Dems won the byelection and Respect finished last, by the way, and George lost his seat in the next general election. So, why does anyone in Canada care to hear what he has to say? I don't understand.
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Some Galloway supporter said: 2006 ELECTION
1) Hamas - 74 seats
2) Fatah - 45 seats
3) PFLP - 3 seats
4) Badeel - 2 seats
5) Independent Palestine - 2
6) Third Way - 2
These 3rd parties were West Bank results, where Hamas did not have a vigilante presence. In Gaza, there was no open and critical campaign - the first rule of a democracy. But of course the clueless left doesn't understand this first basic rule of democracy where the voter must be able to understand and vote for the alternatives to the local strongman rule.
And now we know that Hamas is down to 12% in the poll, in Gaza. And of course Hamas terminated democracy and refuses to put its government to a vote, fakely blaming the Palestinian Authority for not ordering an election. Why would Hamas bother to go to a vote when they will just mount a coop, like they did in 2008, and when they are down to 12%?
And the international monitors simply monitored the voting process and not the electioneering.
Since Hamas was elected Canada gives no aid to Gazans.
Not according to other sources. Besides why should Canada care for Gazans when their own "elected leaders (Hamas)" don't care for them? Hamas has no intention to care for Gazans. Hamas' main objective is to belligerate against Israel and play anti-semite, and advocate the genocide of the Jews. Islam exhorts to genocide of the Jews, and you Galloway left-fascists are quiet about this and in fact deeply support Islam and Islamism including Islamic fascism.
As bad as they are we have no right to demand citizens to vote for the government we approve of.
You mean a decent, liberal and secular government should not be mandated because "we the west approve of it"? What a racist statement. That Gazans have to live with lower expectations of a fascist government that conducts coops and throws the opposition off highrise rooftops and advocates genocide, simple because the better alternative is what "the west wants". The racism of lower expectations is so obvious among Galloway fellow travellers.
Many Pastors and church leaders have been elected in Canada.
So you would not object if a religious government takes over Canada? How about evangelicals taking over Texas? Is that what you totalitarian lefties would like to see happen. Just like the socialists who brought Ay. Khomeini to power (only to be decimated by this cleric). No wonder intelligent and secular folks don't trust the leftards.
No one can cite one example of Galloway calling for violence against anyone or any group.
Well, if Galloway hobnobs and materially supports the Syrian Nazis, and with the Iranian Nazis at Press TV, and the Hezbollahi Nazis in Lebanon, not to mention Hamas - that is as close you can get to violence short of carrying a bazooka.
Sorry, but I am fed up with the morally equivalent and morally delinquent and racist left that associate with rightwing Islam, Hamas and Galloway.
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Kurt,
Can't speak for the rest of Canada, but there is precious little to do in Yellowknife on a weeknight. Really, it was just something to do. Although I suspect a dancing monkey would have garnered a larger audience.
...and there was free coffee and cake.
Martin, I have no quarrel with you. Like me you only attended to get a measure of the man firsthand, and like me, came away with the same impression, and that's to your credit. That's what democracy is about -- listen and judge.
But George only knows how to play to sycophants. He's not interested in dialogue and debate. He dismisses critics as unworthy of response. He preaches from a bully pulpit.
He didn't have a receptive crowd at that Dudden Hill rally, was wearing a suit that no one in the area could ever aspire to, and he couldn't wait to get out and back into his luxury limo for the ride back home.
The candidate who won the byelection was a sane, coherent and decidedly anti-war Lib-Dem Muslim, who was worthy of the vote. Who isn't anti-war? We all are, especially me. But that doesn't mean I'll lick anybody's jackboots. No way.
George showed his true colours a few months back when he challenged a Canadian minister to a boxing match over his alleged, entirely bogus, claims that he was refused entry to Canada (can I add that I didn't vote for the current government?). That was all bluster on George's part.
I was a golden gloves contender when I wax young and would welcome the chance to add George's nose to those that I've broken.
But he is all bravado and no glory. Because in his Utopian ideal world, hired thugs in shiny black boots would muscle dissidents and critics into a dark alley to mete out "justice."
George is spineless, a fat fuck.
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