The Lies Of George Galloway (And The News Media's Habit Of Trafficking In Them).

Read pretty well any newspaper in this country and you would be hard pressed to believe anything but the following completely upside-down version of the ongoing national George Galloway pantomime:

Canada banned the "colourful" Galloway from Canada last year, but Galloway took the goverment to court and won, and that's why he's now on his triumphant "Free Palestine, Free Afghanistan, Free Speech" tour across our country.

Galloway and his pro-fascist supporters (the swastika-emblazoned handbill on the right is from the Canadian section of Syria's fascist party, from one of Galloway's previous, un-noticed Canadian engagements) will tell you that they are "anti-war" and "progressive," too. But those lies I've already dispensed with, so here's some more civic hygiene for you.

Canada's newspapers often refer to Galloway as simply a "former British MP," and sometimes as a former British MP who was expelled from the Labour Party for his "opposition to the war in Iraq." In fact, Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 when he was found guilty on party charges that he "incited Arabs to fight British troops, he incited British troops to defy orders. . . he threatened to stand against Labour [and] he backed an 'anti-war' candidate" against the Labour government. This isn't "opposition to the war." It's supporting the war from the other side.

After Galloway cobbled together his own "Respect Party" from a disgraced and rotten British far-left groupuscule in coalition with Britain's Islamist far-right, he took his seat in the House of Commons as a Respect MP by defeating the progressive Labour MP Oona King (whose downfall was by no means unrelated to the fact she was born of a Black father and a Jewish mother) in the constituency of Bethnall Green and Bow. Galloway was later suspended from the House of Commons for 18 days after Parliamentary anti-sleaze watchdogs found him guilty of not disclosing his links with Saddam Hussein's regime and "strong circumstantial evidence" that he'd connived with Iraq's Baathist dictatorship to rip off the UN's Iraqi oil-for-food program.

That's your "maverick" former British MP for you. But it's the big lie about Justice Mosley's September 27 Federal Court of Canada ruling on the Galloway case that you should know about. Very few journalists are liars, I should first note, but most are too overworked to get the story right, some are just lazy, and a few are simply content to keep repeating rubbish rather than have you know they've been screwing up this story all along. Here's how the lie circulates.

CTV News: Galloway "was denied entry into the country over his alleged [?] financial support of the Palestinian group Hamas." Here's the Calgary Herald: "The antiwar activist, who was barred from Canada . . . was refused entry by the Canada Border Services Agency in 2009 because he reportedly [?] donated money to the Hamas-led Palestinian government, but the decision was recently overturned." Here's a Montreal Gazette report that has Galloway "thanking federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney for the 'ridiculous ban' Canada imposed on him last year, based on Galloway's alleged [?] support for terrorism," which goes on to tell us that the ruling was "quashed by a Federal Court judge." It goes on and on like this. It's all rubbish.

Galloway was not barred, banned or refused entry into Canada, and the courts did not overturn or quash any such non-exist government ban, bar, refusal or ruling. Here is what Judge Mosley actually wrote (read the whole thing yourself if you like):

"The respondents [i.e. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney et. al.] submit that whether they approve of Mr. Galloway’s political beliefs or not is legally irrelevant because his admissibility was legitimately evaluated on the basis of his own actions and in accordance with the relevant legislation. They say there is no evidence of bad faith, bias or a breach of fairness in the performance of their public duties. Moreover, they submit, no legally reviewable decision to exclude Mr. Galloway was in fact made.

"I agree with the respondents that as a matter of law this application must be dismissed. As a result of the respondents’ actions, Mr. Galloway may have been found to be inadmissible to Canada had he actually presented himself for examination to an officer at an airport or a border crossing. That did not happen. A preliminary assessment prepared by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), at the request of the respondents’ political staff, concluded that Mr. Galloway was inadmissible. The steps taken by the respondents’ departments to implement that assessment were never completed. Mr. Galloway made the decision not to attempt to enter Canada because he might be detained. Thus, the respondents’ intentions and actions did not result in a reviewable decision to exclude him."

As Galloway's kaffiyeh-clad secretarial pool persists in pointing out, the judge also wrote: "It is clear that the efforts to keep Mr. Galloway out of the country had more to do with antipathy to his political views than with any real concern that he had engaged in terrorism or was a member of a terrorist organization."

But the judge had already declared the government's "intentions" did not result in a reviewable decision (i.e. a "ban") and the judge also agreed with the government's lawyers that the government's antipathy [eminently justifed, by any anti-fascist standard] was "irrelevant" to the matter at hand. Further, the judge noted that his own opinion about the government's antipathy was "not intended in any way to convey approval of Mr. Galloway’s political views or disapproval of the respondents’ opinions."

Galloway lost. His lawyers' application was "dismissed." And yet Galloway and his fan base have consistently and successfully misrepresented the court decision as a victory and a legal disapproval of the government's "antipathy" to Galloway's politics, when Judge Mosley himself made plain that his decision should not be construed that way at all, and besides, the government's antipathy was "irrelevant." But the news media has taken up the lie, as though facts only complicate a story and the job of a journalist is merely to serve as a stenographer for every jackbooted windbag that convenes a press conference. Well sorry, but this isn't good enough. Again, to be clear: There was no ban, bar, or refusal that Galloway suffered, and no court decision overruled or quashed any such thing. Galloway lost.

There will still be useful idiots who fancy themselves to be of the "Left" who will dismiss an accounting of these facts as merely some mean "smear" of the so-called anti-war movement. They will content themselves with their own narcissistic delusion that it's just an "anti-war" movement they support, blissfully ignoring the fact that whatever you want to call the thing it has already smeared itself sufficiently with its own lies and with the fascist filth that George Galloway exists in order to keep in circulation. They may as well enjoy it while they can, too, because one day - or as my Iranian comrades say, Inshallah - there will be a reckoning.

Galloway's job as a propagandist for the Khomeinist propaganda agency Press TV makes him what trade unionists call a "scab." His work for that employer is a direct function of the Iranian regime's theft of hundreds of honest Iranian journalists' jobs, their firing, the shuttering of their newspapers, their jailing, their persecution, and their torture. Just one of Press TV's recent crimes was to serve as the official recorder of the forced confession tortured out of Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari who spent 118 days in a Tehran jail for the offence of covering last year's massive Iranian protests over the dictatorship's fraudulent presidential election. You can set aside all of Galloway's propaganda services to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iraqi Baathists, the Taliban and the Syrian Baathists - his bosses' boy services to Press TV alone condemn him as a scab and a dirty little blackshirt.

Back in the day, the Left used to know how to deal with scabs and fascists. But supporting Galloway is defending free speech, you insist? No. It's actively aiding and abetting in the Khomeinist suppression of free speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and every other fundamental human right that Galloway's spoiled rich-kid fan club demands for itself and only itself. The "anti-war" movement is all about reactionary rich-kid politics, masquerading in a troops-out and "anti-imperialist" lexicon, that would deny all these same rights and freedoms to the people of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

Only this week, Britain's Ofcom regulatory agency handed down this ruling against Galloway's Khomeinist Press TV: "The broadcaster failed to engage or debate with any point of view that was contrary to the view presented by George Galloway. Rather, Ofcom is of the view that George Galloway, in particular, used the alternative opinions made by the viewers, which were contrary to his own, only as vehicles to punctuate what could be classed as a form of ongoing political polemic, delivered by the presenter directly to camera and unchallenged."

That's Galloway's notion of "free speech" for you. He is a true and loyal servant and mouthpiece for the Iranian police state. He is a demagogue and a hypocrite, and it's long past time for Canadians to grow some spine, stand up to him, and stand up to the campus-bully "anti-war" trash who serve as his butlers, security guards, coachmen, apologists and publicity agents.

ADDENDUM: Congratulations to environmentalist David Suzuki, the Green Party of Canada and NDP MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert for exposing the "Stopwar" fiction that they are endorsers of Galloway's completely creepy Vancouver venue-arrangers. Jonathon Narvey deserves credit for committing an act of real journalism in bringing this to light, and for documenting the way Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan has chosen the coward's course by persisting in the fraud that this is all about "free speech."

This is not about free speech. It never was.

Marg Bar Diktator.

This Is Not A Story About Free Speech. This Is Not A Story About National Security.

(UPDATE: The full half-hour CHQR World Tonight radio interview version of this post's contents is here).

In his contribution to the cacophony about L’affaire Galloway, Christopher Hitchens is not wrong in the substance of the opinions he expresses here. It is just that they are wholly immaterial to the matter at hand. Hitchens is wholly wrong in his assumptions. He didn’t do a lick of homework. He fails, and fails utterly.

(UPDATE II: Appended to his Slate column today, Christopher writes: In my last column, it seems I may have done an injustice to the government and people of Canada in the matter of George Galloway's canceled visit to that country. For elucidation, please consult the following blog post. For my part, let me say it was not so much that Hitchens didn't do a lick of homework, but that the references he relied upon - Canada's national newspapers - are what led him astray).

The pretended difficulties that the fascist thug George Galloway has encountered in making his Canadian appointments are of his own construction and design. This has nothing to do with Geert Wilders, Skokie, or Jean Marie Le Pen. It certainly is not about “the risk of giving the power of censorship to any official.” It is not really a story about Canada's national security, either. None of these things are at stake here, any more than it was ever going to matter who won or lost when Galloway’s Canadian friends launched a court case to try and get Galloway in, the roundabout way.

This is a media circus of the same sort as the midway freak shows that involve displays of Britney Spears as she’s caught driving her SUV with a suckling infant on her lap, or Amy Winehouse snorting coke in a leaked home video. Dress it up anyway you like, that is the function the Galloway rumpus-making serves the news media.

Nevertheless, in the real world, something rather important did happen, and it actually did involve George Galloway.

A couple of weeks ago, a Canadian High Commission official in London had a conversation with someone in George Galloway’s parliamentary staff about the MP’s travel plans. The official then showed George Galloway the personal courtesy of writing him directly to advise him that a preliminary assessment of his admissibility to Canada was not favourable.

In that letter, Immigration Program Manager Robert J. Orr politely referred Galloway to certain provisions of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, specifically, Section 34 (1), which, among other things, cites “engaging in terrorism” as grounds to prevent a person from entering Canada. This provision concerns itself with the national security of peoples in faraway places; in this instance, with the security of the Palestinian people, and the Israeli people. In Canada, engaging in terrorism includes raising money for terrorist groups. In Canada, the death cult Hamas, the worst enemy the cause of Palestinian freedom has ever faced, is listed as a proscribed terrorist group.

Mere days before Orr wrote his letter, Galloway had delivered roughly $2 million (Cdn.) in vehicles, various goods and cash, directly to Hamas boss Ismail Haniyeh. Galloway boasted about this, and openly dared British and European authorities to charge him for breaking the sanctions against Hamas, and he went so far as to stage an event for Al Jazeera television in which he handed over a wad of cash in the equivalent of about $50,000 (Cdn.) directly to Haniyeh. Around the time Orr was composing his letter to Galloway, the British Charity Commission was preparing an investigation into the transactions Galloway was involved with in Gaza.

There is nothing occult about any of this.

In his letter, Orr noted that Galloway was not expected to make his Canadian appointments before March 30, and so he extended to Galloway the further courtesy of inviting him to make a submission to address his preliminary assessment of inadmissibility. The alternative would be that a Border Services Agency official might find himself obliged to make a final determination at some border crossing, informed only by the preliminary assessment, but without the benefit of a submission from Galloway himself. Orr also suggested an alternative to Galloway, to apply for a Temporary Resident Permit, but he also showed Galloway the further kindness of letting him know that it would be unlikely that such an application would succeed.

Instead of proceeding as he was so politely invited, Galloway had a Canadian law firm dash off a letter to Orr that included a citation from Galloway's Wikipedia entry, a denial that he was a member of Hamas, a complaint about Ottawa's affections for Israel, and several other subject-changing diversions. The letter did not deny (because it could not deny) what Galloway had openly boasted of doing.

Galloway hasn't even tried to enter Canada, remember. Instead, he has taken the opportunity to combine with his Canadian admirers to exploit the gullibility and general slovenliness of the press in order to tell a pack of lies, monger a lurid conspiracy theory about a secret plot hatched in Ottawa to silence critics of Canada’s engagements in Afghanistan, fabricate a free-speech controversy, and blame it all on the Jews.

That’s the story Hitchens missed, but he needn't feel lonely, because he wasn't the only one. It is a rare thing, though, when Christopher Hitchens falls for a story that never even happened. In all the foreign and domestic sniggerings, objections, protests and complaints about the way Canada and its officials have handled the Galloway file, you will have to look very hard before you find one - just one - that does not wholly depend upon an embarassing error of fact, a delusion, a conspiracy theory, or an outright lie.

Try it. You will be looking for a long, long time (see also Comrade Weiss, who has opened up a southern front for us on this point in The New Criterion).

To be clear: Despite what all Galloway's friends will tell you, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney did not ban George Galloway from speaking in Canada, or from not speaking in Canada, and neither did any Canadian official do anything of the kind, either. It did not happen. It did not occur. And it won't do to say, well, yes, but however you put it, the whole thing has only only served to draw more attention to Galloway and his "odious opinions." Something has given Galloway the attention he craves, to be sure. But he hasn't been given anything like the attention he properly deserves, and as for why this is so, well, that is a very good question. It is one of the more important questions raised by this whole affair, so I'll take a shot at answering it.

The bigger story in which l'affaire Galloway is a kind of defining moment involves a phenomenon that is playing out on the same tectonic scale as the emergence of a distinctly Canadian democratic socialism in the 1930s, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in the 1960s, and the rise of libertarian prairie populism in the 1990s. As is often the case in such upheavals, journalists are the last to notice.

Something wholly new is emerging in Canada, in all the spaces where the Left used to be, in its activist constituencies, its traditional institutions, and its lexicon. Whatever name you want to give the thing, its noticeable features include a betrayal of progressive internationalism, a pathetic weakness for conspiracy theories, and a routine apologetics for antisemitism and terror. Its outlook is generally parochial, but its global engagements tend to align with fascism’s contemporary Islamist variants, even to the point of objective support for the Taliban.

To read most Canadian newspapers, you probably wouldn't have a clue that any of this was going on.

When Galloway visited Ottawa two years ago, he was every bit as famous as he is now. He was the guest of honour at a publicly-advertised 74th birthday party for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The SSNP is an unambiguously fascist movement with shiny boots and uniforms, its own distinctive swastika, and an anthem sung to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles.

Not one Canadian news organization reported Galloway’s Ottawa visit.

In these ways, a dirty thing goes unreported when it shows its true face, but when it shows the face it wants us to see, it is "widely reported," and this is the face the news media has grown accustomed to presenting to us. In these ways, stenography masquerades as journalism, and journalism becomes something else again. Remember: the "news story" about Galloway that ended up going viral these past few days never even happened.

In that story, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney became so frightened that Galloway would say something fatally witty about Canada’s mission in Afghanistan that he lost his mind and invoked some little known police-state power to keep Galloway out of the country, and thus irretrievably contaminated Canada’s vital bodily free-speech fluids.

This is the story we were all invited to freely discuss. To guide us in our deliberations, the usual pundits took pains to affirm the virtue of their own avant-garde tastes and prejudices by condescending to explain that Galloway is really just a flamboyant British philanthropist, and Ottawa was being mean to him because of his humanitarian work among the Palestinians, and well, you know, the Jews were being beastly about it.

Do you notice how this commentariat consensus wouldn't be so ubiquitous if some Zionist cabal was controlling the media in Canada? Good. Thank you for noticing. Here's something else you will want to notice.

George Galloway is what we used to call a fascist thug. But nowadays, his Canadian fan base, his megaphone-carriers and his booking agents include New Democratic Party MPs, Bloc MPs, the Council of Canadians, the Ottawa Peace Assembly and a legion of student leaders, trade unionists and “anti-war” activists.

Whatever name you want to give this phenomenon, it hasn't been getting the attention it properly deserves. It's been underway for quite some time.

We should be paying attention.

Bank Accounts Frozen, Summons Threatened: George Galloway Blows A Gasket

(UPDATE: Martin Levin is a good man. To my knowledge, apart from Christopher Hitchens - see the note at the bottom of Hitchens' Slate column, here - Martin is the only big-media journalist to publicly allow that there was something of a hoax to what in another universe I might call the "hegemonic narrative" that held big-media journalists in its thrall during what I like to call the Great Galloway Hoax of 2009. By his correction, Martin redeems an important trust that must exist between newspaper journalists and their readers in order for journalism to work properly, and he did so in a gracious and honest way. Which is to say, Martin Levin can be trusted, and he is a good man.)

Upon his return to Britain from "traveling abroad on high profile political business," Stoppist windbag George Galloway found something rather less welcoming than a red carpet waiting for him over the weekend.

Galloway's unopened mail included a warning from officials with the compliance investigations unit of the UK Charity Commission, advising him that they'd lost their patience with him and unless he showed up right quick and ready to answer their questions he'd be hauled before a High Court judge.

Galloway's 'Viva Palestina' Appeal bank accounts have also been frozen.

In predictable fashion, Galloway has responded with a long-winded and vitriolic soliloquy containing wild allegations of dark conspiracies, complaints that the Zionists get all the breaks, and an accusation that the Charity Commission is really motivated by an "obvious prejudice against the Palestinian cause and against Britain's two million-strong Muslim community."

The trouble with all that is the Charity Commission had already been patiently asking Galloway and his crowd to explain their peculiar fundraising activity for several weeks before it first issued notice, way back on March 23, that it was opening an inquiry under the Charities Act. This was just after Galloway had set off for his speaking engagements in the United States. In launching the inquiry, Commission officials explained that they were forced to do so after having become exasperated in repeatedly trying to get straight answers about whether the 'Viva Palestina' funds were really being held for charitable purposes.

In predictable fashion, Galloway responded back then by muttering insinuations about ulterior motives, and he alluded to the Commission's previous failures to pin anything on him, even during his "campaign against sanctions on Iraq." A fair point, in a way, since even the British Parliament gave Galloway at least a minor suspension after parliamentary sleaze police found him guilty of failing to disclose his "charity" links with Saddam Hussein's regime. Galloway then uttered some more dark warnings about strange coincidences. But Galloway's story didn't exactly stand up very well.

His stories rarely do, but in this case, only a couple of weeks before the March 23 inquiry launch, Galloway had given away the game all by himself. In a flight of hubris, while "traveling abroad on high profile political business," in the course of delivering roughly $2 million (Cdn.) in booty to Hamas boss Ismail Haniyeh, Galloway publicly taunted British and European authorities. He dared them to charge him. While handing over the cash to Haniyeh, Galloway said: "Here is the money. This is not charity. This is politics." The UK Terrorism Act explicitly prohibits fundraising for proscribed terrorist organizations. In the UK, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization.

Around the time of the March 23 inquiry launch, someone in Galloway's parliamentary staff was in conversation with a Canadian High Commission official in London. It was about Galloway's chances of being able to make the speaking engagements he'd arranged in Canada, in light of everything Galloway had been up to. The High Commission's Immigration Program Manager, Robert J. Orr, followed up the conversation with a polite letter suggesting that Galloway's chances didn't look too good. In Canada, like the UK, it is illegal to raise funds for terrorist organizations, and in Canada, like the UK, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization. The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act contains admissibility requirements for visitors that set a rather high bar for Hamas bagmen.

In predictable fashion, Galloway responded by conjuring up another great conspiracy: Canadian politicians were "seeking to ban" him from the country. After failing to get assurances that he would be put above Canadian law and given an advance exemption from Canada's admissibility requirements, he combined with his Canadian fan base to circulate a fanciful story that he had been singled out and barred from entering Canada because of a secret federal plot to silence critics of Canada’s engagements in Afghanistan. It was an outrage against free-speech, and the culprits behind it all? Starts with 'J.'

By and large, because of the gullibility, political illiteracy and in some cases stark-raving idiocy abroad in certain sections of Canada's national press, the conspiracy theory went viral.

But the facts remain. The evidence remains, and it looks like the curtains are starting to come down. That's why George Galloway is blowing another gasket.

This is not about charity. This is about politics.

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.

A Vote Result All Canadians Should Like

Famous Mosleyite and Canada-basher George Galloway has been voted off the British trash-television show Celebrity Big Brother.

He was turfed from the Big Brother House by a public vote after three weeks of antics with such carnival attractions as failed Baywatch flake Traci Bingham, dreary pop singer Pete Burns, a rapper known as Maggot, and some Paris Hilton impersonator whose name I can't remember. Even they couldn’t stand him.

George Galloway is the “outspoken British MP” who made headlines across Canada last September when he came to Toronto and Mississauga to shout at us and call us names for sending our soldiers to Afghanistan.

Galloway, the leader of Britain’s homophobe-funded “Respect” Party, is the darling of certain pseudoleftists who insist, for instance, that Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan is an “illegal” and "imperialist" war of “occupation.”

Or at least he was their darling last September, when he was calling Canada a stooge of U.S. imperialism for working with soldiers from 35 other countries to help the people of Afghanistan rebuild their country after decades of war and fascist tyranny.

While Canadians have been getting killed and dismembered doing that brave work during the past three weeks, Galloway has been on the telly every night in Britain, crawling around in a fluffy white bathrobe pretending to be a cat, doing Elvis impersonations, dressing up like Dracula, and dancing around in a red leotards (you can Google all of the above for yourself).

But the pseuds have been quiet about George lately.

You’d think they’d be crowing about the British court decision this week that upheld a libel ruling Galloway won against the Daily Telegraph for its handling of documents reportedly found in Baghdad that appeared to show that Galloway had been getting huge annual payoffs from Saddam Hussein.

It could be that the silence is because the decision came down around the same time as the publication of fresh pictures of Galloway having a few laughs with Saddam’s son, the now-dead psychotic rapist and torturer Uday Hussein.

But for some time now, Galloway has been making it increasingly difficult for his friends to make excuses for him. After that pit stop in Canada during his shout-and-hector tour of the United States, the Bethnall and Bow MP put in some face-time with his pal the Syrian strongman Bashar “breath of fresh air” al-Assad. Then Galloway got voted Britain’s most expensive backbench MP by the London School of Economics. Then he found himself further embroiled in scandal related to his dubious “charitable” work.

Don’t get me wrong: The left has not been universally quiet about Galloway.

Last year, long before Galloway climbed into his red leotards, the popular left-wing writer Greg Palast was describing him this way: “Mr. Galloway isn’t really opposed to the war in Iraq. He simply supports another side. Apart from being a shill for Saddam (and for Stalin), Mr. Galloway is also a sleazy and corrupt dandy.”

Progressive columnist Marc Cooper described a Galloway speech to a Boston crowd last fall this way: “Since he clearly sides with the suicide bombers, the beheaders and the other psychopaths that murder civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, a wave of horror washed over me when I realized that the people in the generally well-dressed, well-educated crowd cheering Galloway were, in essence, cheering for their own deaths.”

And there’s Harry, whose headline on the Galloway’s Big-Brother House eviction on Thursday was the best: “Vacuum Cleaner Sucks Up Budgie.” And of course there’s always the ever-delightful Pop-Trotskyites.

If you’d like to give the Honourable Mr. Galloway your own opinion of him, directly, you can email him, here.

Olivia Chow's Cheap Stunt: 'My Favorite Fascist Was Barred; How Come Coulter Gets In?'

As followers of these creepy circus-midway acts will know by now, the University of Ottawa has canceled [or not] a performance by the freakish Yankee harridan Ann Coulter on the dubious ground that some sort of security threat [or not] had arisen from the presence of a herd of people who clearly spend too much time watching Fox News without their smelling salts close at hand.

Insufficiently noticed in the ruckus was the grandstanding opportunity to which Olivia Chow (NDP Toronto-Spadina) rushed in the House of Commons, only to make a bigger fool of herself for free and by accident than Coulter likes to make of herself on purpose and for money.

Mr. Speaker, once again the government is showing its hypocrisy. A year after banning anti-war MP George Galloway from entering Canada, the minister of censorship has no problem with letting a pro-war Conservative come and preach hate.

George Galloway is not an "anti-war" MP, and he was not banned from entering Canada. Back in the days before such terms became too indelicate and blush-making for the sort of people who constitute Olivia Chow's activist base, we would have called Galloway a fascist thug, or perhaps a Mosleyite demagogue. "Anti-war" is not the compound adjective that would have come immediately to mind, at any rate.

And Galloway was not banned from Canada. He dodged a speaking engagement in Canada last year knowing full well that if he attempted to enter Canada he might have found himself detained for being on the wrong side of Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act. That's because Galloway had just come from Gaza, where he'd made a great public show of delivering bags of loot to Hamas boss Ismael Haniya, whose gangsters murdered their way into power in Gaza and have since busied themselves with "arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, maimings by shooting, and extrajudicial executions" of suspected anti-Hamas Palestinians.

And Galloway was not in Gaza to donate his cash to some charitable purpose, either. That's another lie. In Galloway's own words: "Many of my friends have to give their cash to charities. But I, now, here, on behalf of myself, my sister Yvonne Ridley, and the two Respect councillors – Muhammad Ishtiaq and Naim Khan – are giving three cars and 25,000 pounds in cash to Prime Minister Ismail Haniya. Here is the money. This is not charity. This is politics."

In the House, Chow disgracefully parroted Galloway's conspiracy propaganda - "CBSA was told that Galloway could not be admitted under any circumstances" - and referred to Galloway as a "pro-peace MP," if you don't mind. (A digression: It would appear that the dirty little blackshirts who form Galloway's Canadian entourage have managed to raise less than $7,000 of the $20,000 they had planned to bilk from gullible hippies to pay off Galloway's crack legal team.)

Here's Chow's "pro-peace" British MP for you: "I glorify the Hizbollah national resistance movement, and I glorify the leader of Hizbollah, Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah."

Well of course he would. After all, it seems like just yesterday that Galloway was in Ottawa to celebrate the 74th birthday party for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party - an unambiguously fascist movement with shiny boots and uniforms, its own distinctive swastika, and an anthem sung to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles.

Infamous for traveling to Baghdad to slobber on the slippers of the "indefatigable" Saddam Hussein, Olivia Chow's favorite fascist is nothing if not promiscuous in his affections for authoritarian police states. Galloway is a celebrity presenter for Press TV, the scab-run, holocaust-denying propaganda arm of the Tehran regime, which routinely jails and murders trade unionists, Bahais, journalists and dissenters. On the collapse of the decrepit Soviet regime: "The worst day of my life.”

Well, to be fair, there are some things about the old Soviet Union that are to be missed, I suppose. The soaring brilliance of their pop-music idols, for instance. Even more engrossing than an Ann Coulter performance:

The Company We Keep

George Galloway, the British MP who has just now been reportedly denied entry to Canada, is a petty and notoriously corrupt streetcorner demagogue who moonlights as a scab for the journalist-jailing authoritarian regime in Tehran. He is perhaps the English-speaking world's most strident defender of the boodthirsty, far-right religious movement Hezbollah, Tehran's proxy army in Lebanon. He is a successful fundraiser for the religious-fundamentalist death cult Hamas, which is banned in Canada and for which it is specifically illegal to raise funds in Canada.

Galloway is a thug, a collaborator with totalitian Baathism, and one of the most sinister champions of a global Islamist reaction that has resulted in the jailing, torture and execution of tens of thousands of Muslim democrats, women's rights leaders, socialists and liberals. A proper left-wing debate about what to do about someone like George Galloway might focus on whether he should be summarily executed as a counter-revolutionary, allowed to serve out the remainder of his miserable life in prison, or allowed to remain at large so that the people could laugh at him, insult him, or ignore him to their heart's content.

But when we turn in Canada for left-wing leadership on the question of what to do about George, we are summoned to rally to his cause, and instructed to subscribe to a conspiracy theory.

Worse - to give you an idea just how degenerate certain sections of the "Left" in this country have become - Galloway is routinely celebrated as an "anti-war" hero. And not just by lunatic-fringe elements who show up at demonstrations with embarrassing placards, either.

The first time Galloway visited Canada, he was warmly welcomed by Olivia Chow (who is taking up his cause again), Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton and MP Joe Comartin. Then he returned to Canada for a 74th birthday celebration for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which has its own stylized swastika, sings its anthem to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles, and dreams of a greater Syria from the Nile to the Euphrates.

To shed further light into the depths of this degeneracy, both the Canadian Peace Alliance and the Toronto Stop The War Coalition are run by the Canadian affiliate of the formerly left-wing sect that formed Galloway's 'Respect Coalition' activist base, in alliance with far-right Muslim fundamentalists, after Galloway was ejected from the British Labour party for counseling the murder of British soldiers.

Galloway says he is going to sue Canada for denying him entry. I hope he wins. Not because of some dizzy libertarian argument about his "right" to visit Canada - he has absolutely no such right - but because the Immigration Act section under which he is being barred entry needs to be scrapped, and a wholly-rewritten section put in its place.

Canada can bar a foreign national for security reasons, such as spying, engaging in an act of subversion against a democratic government or institution or process, engaging in or instigating the subversion by force of any government, engaging in terrorism, being a danger to the security of Canada, or if there are "reasonable grounds" to believe a foreign national will engage in this sort of thing.

The "subversion by force of any government" is the problem. The effect of the law is to close Canada's doors to any freedom fighter engaged in armed struggle, or even advocating armed struggle, to overthrow precisely the tyrannies Galloway can't stop himself from sucking up to.

We should be allowed by our own laws to determine the company we keep. Much of the Left in Canada may well be too far gone to be able to recognize a dirty little blackshirt like Galloway for what he is. But that doesn't mean that the rest of us should not be entitled to live in a country with laws sufficient to welcome our friends in the struggle for democracy and against tyranny, and to deny safe harbour, of any kind, to any of their sworn enemies.

Theatre Of The Absurd: Are These Liberal MPs "Terrorist" Supporters?

I can't decide whether to laugh or spit. The baying of the hounds begins.

The CBC has revealed nothing particularly new here: "Five Liberal members of Parliament say they did nothing wrong when they accepted an invitation from an Iranian opposition group on Canada's terrorist list." I say the same - they did nothing wrong. As was quite proper, MPs Raymonde Folco, Carolyn Bennet, Rob Oliphant, Andrew Telegdi and Tom Wappel filed with the federal ethics commissioner the details their 2008 and 2009 visits to France at the invitation of Mojahedin e Khalq, also known as the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran. That is the big "news."

In June this year, I myself happily accepted an invitation to attend the same annual gathering of the National Council of the Resistance in Iran, the umbrella group that includes the People's Mojahedin -which is in fact a decidedly non-terrorist group, no matter what Canada's ridiculous, broken and unenforceable "anti-terrorist" laws have to say about the subject. I made the trip under my own steam, as if that should matter. I reported about it here.

In Paris I was proud to be in the company of the MPs Oliphant, Folco, Yasmin Ratansi and Pablo Rodriguez, human rights activist David Matas, former MP and current Burnaby - New Westminster Conservative candidate Paul Forseth, and former Alberta MP David Kilgour (who served as the emcee for the 2009 Paris gathering, attended by about 90,000 Iranians from around the world). Kilgour is as principled and committed a democrat as you will meet in a day's walk.

It can't be repeated often enough: The NCRI/PMOI is not a terrorist group. It doesn't matter what you or I think of their politics. The NCRI/PMOI has been given a clean bill of health by several European investigations and court decisions. The only reason the "terrorist" slander is legally applied to the PMOI in Canada is because the Americans do it. The only reason the Americans do it is to because Bill Clinton wanted to make kissy-face with the Iranian mullahs back in the day, and the mullahs wanted the Mojahedin listed by the Yanks. No wonder: The Mojahedin are Tehran's Worst Nightmare.

The result, whatever one thinks of the PMOI's politics or its past, is that the constitutional rights of all Canadians to freely associate with a major Iranian democratic front is arbitrarily circumscribed, usurped and trampled upon. It is all the rage these days to pronounce oneself a champion of free speech, but the inextricably-related freedom of association? Not so much.

Even as these Liberal MPs are being unfairly tarnished with the "terrorist" brush, we have the clerical-fascist Iranian regime's most effective propaganda agent, George Galloway, who is also the most eager fundraiser in the "west" for the unambiguously terrorist organization Hamas, applying bikini wax to his ugly face for another round of speaking engagements in Canada. What should you expect? Expect more lies.

That is what it has come to. The NCRI/PMOI is effectively criminalized in Canada, and brave Canadian parliamentarians who take the time to stand in solidarity with the Iranian resistance are publicly traduced, while agents of the Iranian police state - a regime that jails and murders trade unionists, womens rights' activists, and even hip-hop enthusiasts, if you don't mind - are allowed to operate openly in Canada and to come and go as they damn well please.

I'm getting tired of pointing this out: Here we have the red-fascist demagogue George Galloway doing what he does best, opening a new propaganda campaign for Islamist fascism aimed at the west’s liberal intelligentsia. Here we have one of Galloway’s most slavish admirers in the Canadian establishment media, doing Galloway’s propaganda for him. The clear evidence against Galloway hasn’t made a jot of difference. He’ll be warmly embraced. As he is here. Do you really need more?

A good primer on the legal issues involved in the Galloway fiasco is presented here, courtesy of the Osgoode Hall Law School: "George Galloway Was Never 'Barred' From Canada For His Politics": "The definition of 'terrorism' provided in s. 83.01 of the Criminal Code provides that the offence requires a mental element." It is not sufficient that the accused knowingly participated in or contributed to a terrorist group. It must also be shown that the accused "intended to aid or facilitate its terrorist activity.”

Thus, plausible deniability is offered as a legal defence to every nutcase who might want to send a huge bag of cash to Al Qaida: 'Gee, I thought they would just use the money to produce public-service announcements about Islamophobia.' Thus, even a greasy little blackshirt and Hamas bagman like Galloway can slip in and out of Canada, untroubled by the law. A "mental element" indeed.

To make matters even more absurd, Canada's anti-terrorism laws make no distinction between clearly anti-democratic acts of terror aimed at civilians and legitimate acts of revolutionary violence (or even self-defence) aimed against police-states. There is a difference.

Fix the law.

In Paris with the NCRI/Mojahedin: Obscure American celebrity John Bolton with Canadian Liberal MP Rob Oliphant:

The Latest George Galloway Stunt: Expect More Lies.

Fiction, reported in the Globe and Mail: "I didn’t give any money to Hamas, I gave it to the ministry of health in Gaza to pay for the salaries of the doctors and nurses who hadn’t been paid. By the way, we’re talking about 20 odd thousand pounds, not millions. It’s a symbolic donation. I gave it to the ministry of health in Gaza and I’m proud to have done so."

Fact, by Galloway's own admission, broadcast on several Arab television stations: "I, now, here, on behalf of myself, my sister Yvonne Ridley, and the two Respect councillors – Muhammad Ishtiaq and Naim Khan – are giving three cars and 25,000 pounds in cash to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Here is the money. This is not charity. This is politics." Not charity, but politics. Not to "doctors and nurses who hadn’t been paid," but to the Hamas gangster "Prime Minister" Ismail Haniyeh who, in fact, is not and was not the Prime Minister of Palestine.

Fiction: Galloway's Viva Palestina raised £1 million for the suffering Palestinians of Gaza. Fact: "However, based on information obtained from PayPal and the IBB, the Commission was able to identify only approximately £180,000 as having been raised for the Charity. If the website’s claims were accurate this raised concerns that approximately £820,000 was unaccounted for."

Fact: Months before Galloway handed over three cars and a bag of cash to the head of a gang of clerical-fascist, Jew-hating lunatics who have pretty well strangled the prospect of a free Palestinian state in the womb - and Galloway has admitted to the British Charity Commission that this was "'personal money' that had been handed to Hamas" - the Government of Canada had already provided $4 million in emergency relief to the people of Gaza.

Galloway wasn't banned from Canada, either. Section 34 (1) of Canada's Immigration and Refugee Protection Act specifically cites “engaging in terrorism” as grounds to prevent a person from entering Canada. Engaging in terrorism includes raising money for terrorist groups. In Canada, the death cult Hamas, the worst enemy the cause of Palestinian freedom has ever faced, is listed as a proscribed terrorist group.

If you are a triggerman or a bagman for a proscribed terrorist organization, you are normally considered inadmissible to Canada, and being a rich celebrity white guy with a British passport and a cult following in this country doesn't mean you're above the law. The Canadian High Commission showed Galloway the courtesy of letting him know that. That is all.

No Pasaran.

Springtime For The Stupid: Khomeinist Scab George Galloway Returns To Canada.

The thing to remember about stupid people is that there's no point in trying to explain anything to them. They won't understand a thing you're saying. This is why they're called "stupid people." As a political phenomenon, stupid people are usually dealt with by ordinary people in liberal democracies quite effectively, by making them objects of public ridicule. The problem is that this sometimes accrues to stupid people a kind of celebrity status that any fool can quickly convert into political capital. Things can get out of hand, as the Italians have discovered. You wake up one morning and you find that your veteran national-affairs journalists have been reduced to reporting the details of "bunga bunga" orgies.

The next thing you know, police budgets are being eroded by criminal investigations into the backgrounds of buxom young women prancing around the prime minister's residence in kinky Carabinieri uniforms and saucy nurses' outfits. Then the judiciary is reduced to solemn inquiries to determine whether the public treasury has been in any way invoiced for the 74-year-old prime minister's rent-free harem of 14 showgirls that he keeps in a pensione around the corner from his villa, and whether the fees they charge for their erotic performances have been billed to the exective branch of the government. Pretty soon everybody's going all nostalgic for the days when Mussolini was running things. This is not exactly a good sign for the prospects of a liberal democracy.

That's the other thing about stupid people. They're often quite charming, but they tend to lower the tone. There's no point in trying to just shut them up because it never works, and besides it would be wrong because stupid people are entitled to the rights of free speech. Thus it is in America, the birthplace of the 1st Amendment, that the political problem of stupid people has been lately addressed by lowering the threshold of polite speech to make way for a peculiar pop-culture entertainment phenomenon called the Glenn Beck Show.

This was a uniquely American stroke of genius in the way it affirmed the stupid political identity politics of the great American melting pot. Glenn Beck provides vast numbers of stupid people who fancy themselves to be "progressive" with a simulacrum of evidence that they're not the stupid ones after all, while at the same time offering stupid people who attribute their stupidity to being "conservative" a dazzling current-affairs show that makes him look so stupid he actually makes his fans look almost smart. But lately the Glenn Beck project has begun to bore Americans to tears, and it's also outlived its usefulness to the Republican Party.

We do things differently in Canada. While the American way often exposes the limits of the free market, Canada accomodates stupid people in almost the opposite way. It's a tribute to Canadian establishment's distinct multicultural celebration of the identity politics of stupid people that much greater success is evident in the game's Canadian rules. Canada plays it like a vast affirmative-action program for stupid people that is often so subsidized by our best universities and by our biggest public sector unions that you'd think resources were limitless.

For some long while in Canada, a deafening bedlam has been emanating from stupid people whose politics are the most grotesquely tyrant-friendly, the most noticeably accommodating of antisemites (anti-Zionist variety), the most valuable to misogynists and to the extreme religious right (Islamic variety), the most vehemently opposed to Canada's solidarity with the Afghan anti-fascist struggle, and the most reactionary. The way we accomodate stupid people of this sort - because this is Canada, after all - is to encourage them to make themselves presentable as fashionably progressive, avant-garde and "left-wing."

This works splendidly because it makes this particular variety of stupid people feel good about themselves and they don't even notice what is happening (see above - they won't understand a thing you're saying, etc.). Conservatives are content to go along with the pantomime because it makes their left-wing adversaries look so stupid, which is fair play, I suppose. But it is a racket.

This brings us to the disgraced former British MP George Galloway, the greasiest spokesman for the Khomeinist tyranny in the English-speaking world, celebrity presenter for the Khomeinist propaganda arm Press TV, admirer of Saddam Hussein, bagman for Hamas, darling of the Arab autocrats' business press and shameless brown-noser to Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. Tonight, Galloway will be speaking in Toronto, at the Trinity - St. Paul's Centre. He will be discussing what Canada can do "to support the Arab peoples' struggle for liberation," if you please.

To recap: George Galloway has earned a lifetime's profit from slobbering on the very boots in which the world's warmongering Arab tyrants now stand quaking. In Britain, Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party on charges that he incited Arabs to fight British troops, although to be fair he is probably best remembered for dressing up in red tights on a reality television show and drinking milk from the cupped hands of Rula Lenska, an aging celebrity whose celebrity derives from having once been a young celebrity. In Canada, Galloway is heralded as an "anti-war" celebrity and a "progressive," and now he has been invited to visit Canada yet again, this time to present himself as a friend to the risen masses of Arabs and Iranians at whose bravery and suffering he has done nothing but sneer.

It's not clear who Galloway's Canadian hosts are this time around. Not long ago Galloway's Canadian venues were being organized by Syria's unambiguously fascist party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which is part of Al-Assad's ruling junta. But it could be Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, Artists Against War, or the Venezuela We Are With You Coalition. You want to make some sense out of that?

Dal Street, a proper British socialist, puts it this way: "Outside of a residual Stalinist mindset, it makes no sense at all. And from a socialist perspective it is simply repugnant." Fair enough. You don't have to be a socialist to find all this repugnant, but if you still think what is happening here is in any way "progressive" in any recognizeable sense of that gravely-diminished term, then you should probably just sit back, tune in Glenn Beck, and let him explain it to you.

Just relax. You won't feel a thing.

The Great George Galloway Hoax of 2009, Lab Test Result: Jawbone of Orang-Utang

Macleans Magazine: "Why is a self-described free speech hawk banning George Galloway from Canada?"

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney: "He’s not. I reject the premise of your question. Mr. Galloway received a preliminary notice of determination by the Canadian Border Services Agency that he might be inadmissible to Canada, I gather based in large part on his public admission that he provided funds to Hamas, a banned illegal terrorist organization, which would seem–on the face of it–to constitute grounds for inadmissibility under Section 34(1)f of the Immigration Refugee Protection Act. He was invited to provide submissions to the CBSA to inform their consideration of his potential application to enter Canada. He never provided them with any such submissions and he never presented himself to a point of entry where he would have had, at that point, a final decision on his admissibility, and had he been determined to be inadmissible by an officer at a port of entry he would have been able to apply for an inadmissibility hearing. So there’s a whole process that we have under our law to make determinations independently of politicians about admissibility. I simply said publicly that I would not use my extraordinary ministerial power to effectively overrule a decision of a CBSA officer on his admissibility. Why? Because I didn’t see any compelling reason. And by the way, this had nothing to do with freedom of speech, he exercised his speech in Canada, volubly, as he does everywhere. That was never the issue. The issue was not about what he might do or say in Canada, it’s what he did in making financial contributions to an organization that uses money to buy explosives and strap them to teenagers and send them into school buses and discos."

Told you so. Sorry, but even "by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle," it would still be impossible to say, without repeating a lie, that George Galloway was banned from Canada, or barred from Canada, or denied entry to Canada. Paul McCartney is not dead, Charlies Manson never auditioned for the Monkees, and sorry, Olivia, but George Galloway is not an "international expert" on Afghanistan. Thank you, Martin, for pointing out that Elvis has left the building. Sorry, Canadian Peace Alliance, but your evidence for "dawn man" turns out to be merely the jawbone of an orang-utang. Sorry, delicate ladies of the bourgeoisie, but your prince is a toad.

And I won't be having any backchat along the lines of 'Well, Kenney would say that, wouldn't he?' or 'So, shilling for the Conservatives now, is it?' or 'That's just your opinion.' Because this is not a matter of opinion. These are matters of fact. Facts matter. This is about things that did not happen, and things that did happen, and to paraphrase George Orwell, "they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late."

George Galloway is a fascist gasbag. A walking farrago of lies (Update: a 911 Truther, too?).

Have I enjoyed myself with all this? Yes, thanks, I have.

Black Day In Bahrain; The Uprising Spreads.

BAHRAIN - People carrying men, women and children - some bleeding from bullet wounds, others overcome by tear gas - crowded into Salmaniya Medical Center, where the frantic, overwhelmed staff struggled to cope. Thousands of demonstrators demanding a proper democracy in place of Bahrain's U.S.-backed al Khalifa dynasty then converged on the hospital. That prompted security forces to surround it until some police officers began taking off their uniforms and joining the protesters, to an eruption of cheers.

"We are peaceful. We don't even have a rock," Mohammad, a 26-year-old laborer who was to afraid to give his full name, cried as the throng shouted, "The victory is from Allah, and it will be with us," "Down, down, Khalifa" and "The people want the regime to fall.”

Nicholas Kristof reports that in fact the bloodshed in Bahrain has been much worse: "As a reporter, you sometimes become numbed to sadness. But it is heartbreaking to be in modern, moderate Bahrain right now and watch as a critical American ally uses tanks, troops, guns and clubs to crush a peaceful democracy movement and then lie about it. . . When a king opens fire on his people, he no longer deserves to be ruler."

The Fifth Fleet is docked in Bahrain. The Yanks have no excuse this time. Aim the ships' guns on the presidential palace and send a note to King Hamad: Good morning. Look out your window. Have we made ourselves clear? Instead, the only thing Bahrainis are hearing from Washington is mewling and more mewling about the diplomatic and geostrategic importance of a "key ally" in the Khalifa dynasty.

Make the Bahraini people your ally, you thick Yanks. You'll not want to outstay your welcome there. Ha'aretz reports that two Iranian warships are making their way through the Suez canal, bound for Syria, and Iran may be on the verge of a civil war. Iran's opposition called for a nationwide day of protest on Sunday and Kurdish workers are calling for a general strike in the Kurdish provinces to coincide with it. "The Islamic Republic has already collapsed," Opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi declared today. Karroubi and his fellow Green Movement leader Hossein Mousavi are now openly calling for a struggle against the country's "religious dictatorship."

It's their clearest statement yet that the movement must dedicate itself to the Khomeinist tyranny's overthrow, taking up the demands of tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters who took to the streets on Monday to demand "regime change." That's the term used nowadays for what used to be called "revolution."

The fire has spread in ways unthinkable only last week.

In Djibouti, a Friday demonstration that was said to have brought as many as 2,000 people into the streets was in fact much larger than that, says Mohamed Daoud Chehem of the opposition Djibouti Party for Development. The demonstrators in Djibouti will follow the lead of the Egyptians, Chehem said: "We have come to stay here. This freedom place. Like Egypt. We want to stay here." In Kuwait, more than 1,000 stateless bedouins staged a protest demonstration on Friday to demand citizenship. There were dozens of arrests. In Libya, it's hard to say what's happening. Social media sites like Facebook and other means of reporting and organizing by the internet have been shut down, but Agence France Presse reports that at least 41 Libyans have died in the violence over the past three days. Looks like 84 dead now.

In Damascus, responding to the call from opposition groups to rise up against the oppressive regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, hundreds of Syrians protested police violence Thursday after traffic cops beat a young man. The crowd chanted: "The Syrian people will not be humiliated" and "Thieves, thieves." The protesters blocked traffic for three hours, forcing the minister to come to the spot and talk to the victim's family.

Yes, even Syria, the dictatorship run by Bashar al Assad, "the last Arab ruler," as the pro-fascist 'anti-war' movement hero George Galloway called him not long ago, and Syria, "the last Arab country." Galloway is the Khomeinist tyranny's loudest propaganda agent in the English-speaking world, and he fairly boasted about it during the 2009 Iranian revolt, which he happily predicited would soon "fizzle out." Galloway calls the Syrian dictatorship "the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs.” It is at last possible to imagine that Galloway may be proved right in ways he wouldn't want, sooner than it was only recently impossible to imagine. Even Galloway's Syrian role model may fall. Even the Khomenists may fall. Where would Galloway and the Canadian Peace Alliance draw their sustenance from then? Belarus, probably.

This is Syria today:

Behold George Galloway! Part Mick Jagger! Part Noam Chomsky!

In today's Toronto Star, boot-polishing, apologetics, conspiracy-theory, the lot: "It was fear of Galloway galvanizing anti-war sentiment in peace-oriented Canadians that prompted Ottawa to brand him a terrorist supporter. . .what exactly does this secretive management committee do, and how might it affect Canada's Muslim and Arab populations?"

A formidable late-entry in the contest called Oooh! He Cuts Such A Dashing Figure In His Uniform, Too, Don’t You Think?

Meanwhile, this just in: "So, how much DID the Zionists pay for him, anyways?" "You mean for this Glavin dude? Or how much did they pay for Galloway to be kept away from Canada? Also, does Minister Kenney accept payment in shekels?" Followed by: "Antisemitism is a pretty harsh accusation, one that's being thrown around a lot by the right wing lately. I certainly hope you can back that accusation up."

Thank you, Celebrity Big Brother followers.

Do please read that Toronto Star column. You will see that it articulates exactly the bourgeois-radical consensus that was already entrenched in the matter of the Galloway affair, and which I was so insolent as to merely point out, a full week ago: "To guide us in our deliberations, the usual pundits took pains to affirm the virtue of their own avant-garde tastes and prejudices by condescending to explain that Galloway is really just a flamboyant British philanthropist, and Ottawa was being mean to him because of his humanitarian work among the Palestinians, and well, you know, the Jews were being beastly about it." Now, McQuaig is actually inviting us deeper into conspiracy theory, into Five Dancing Israelis territory.

I rest my case.

Locked & Loaded for Galloway

Journalist and activist Brett Lock has cast a helpfully cold light on George Galloway, the "outspoken" and "left-wing" British MP who recently upbraided Canadians for sending soldiers to Afghanistan on the grounds that by doing so, we were merely helping the Yanks and the Brits do the devil's work in Fallujah.

Galloway, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, came to Mississauga September 17 to tell us: "I'm amazed that so many people in Canada believe they're not a part of this crime. . . your soldiers in Afghanistan are doing the dirty work of George W. Bush and Tony Blair."

It didn't take much sleuthing on Lock's part to discover that Galloway himself is no stranger to the devil's work and has been keeping some rather sordid company of his own. By Lock's lights, it's not too much of a stretch to say: Respect candidate would execute gays.

Lock is referring to Dr Mohammed Naseem, who ran as a candidate for Galloway's Respect party. Dr. Naseem bankrolled Respect's election campaign, providing a third of its election war chest, and serves on Respect's executive committee. Dr. Naseem also acts as the "home affairs spokesman" for the Islamic Party of Britain, about which Lock reports:

"They would ban gay organisations, or to put it in their words, they would “safeguard public decency by preventing any public advocacy for homosexuality”. Any violation of this law would fall under “public incitement”, which leads us to their next point – how to deal with public displays of homosexuality or “lewdness witnessed by several people” as they quaintly put it. The penalty for that is death!"

It's all there at Lock & Load

That's It. I Want My Scalps.

The MP George Galloway has compared Israel to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who experimented on prisoners and with body parts of concentration camp victims.

In an article in the Scottish Daily Record entitled “Dark Echoes of the Holocaust”, the outspoken Respect MP criticised the lack of press attention given to Israel’s admission of taking unauthorised organs from both Israelis and Palestinians.

He said Israel was “playing mini-Mengele on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.”

Mengele was the so-called ‘Angel of Death’ at Auschwitz, who conducted gruesome experiments on inmates, particularly on twins, and ordered the deaths of prisoners with medical problems.

Mr Galloway also boosted the claims of Swedish journalist Daniel Bostrom, who wrote in the newspaper Aftonbladet that Israelis were kidnapping and murdering Palestinian children for their organs.

Mr Galloway said he owed Mr Bostrom an apology for not believing the report.

He said: “When the story first broke, on Swedish TV, I frankly did not believe it. Implacable critic of Israel as I am, it was beyond belief that a country calling itself the ‘Jewish State’ could ever do such a thing.

“I met the correspondent responsible for the story months ago and rigorously questioned him about it. I was not satisfied, and didn't use the information. The man was offended and I owe him an apology.

"I am now at a loss for words, and sick at heart."

Wait. . . my mistake. That last sentence comes from somewhere else.

Anyway. The truth, if anyone cares about that sort of thing anymore, is here, and there's a bit more of it (comes with a bonus warning about what happens when people become morally incapable of discerning the difference between the truth and lies) here, and the ongoing, dirty consequences, leavened with various amusing eruptions, here.

If you get that far and you're still interested in reading the great Organ-Plundering Zionists Snatch Thousands of Ukrainian Tots Shock article that Al Ameen has now determined to be a wee bit too light on facts to be kept up at their newspaper's website, don't worry. You can still read it all, word for word, courtesy Press TV, the Iranian mullahocracy's propaganda arm. The Moseleyite gangster George Galloway works there, I am sure it will not surprise you to learn, as a celebrity presenter.

And he does cut such a dashing figure in his uniform, don't you think? Such nice boots!

Elsewhere, my comrade Eamonn McDonagh reports: Israeli Embassy Controls Buenos Aires City Hall, and a walk down memory lane: Attack Of The Giant Zionist Bus Drivers From Mars.