Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Galloway is Suspended, Laughs

Here's the full text of the parliamentary report on which the 18-day suspension of George Galloway was based. Within the terms of their investigation the Parliamentary standards committee found that Galloway had used undeclared money from a foreign government to wage a political and advocacy campaign. This fact, while there was no proof that Galloway had personally pocketed money, lay at the root of their decision to recommend suspension.

As we have demonstrated in this report, we agree with the Commissioner that there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Oil for Food Programme was used by the Iraqi government, with Mr Galloway's connivance, to fund the campaigning activities of the Mariam Appeal. In acting as he did, Mr Galloway breached the advocacy rule and damaged the reputation of the House. We believe he was complicit in the concealment of the true source of the funds for the Mariam Appeal. He was also in our view reckless in the terms of the authority he gave Mr Fawaz Zureikat to act in his name in relation to the Mariam Appeal. Further he was clearly irresponsible in refusing to enquire into the source of Mr Zureikat's substantial donations. His obligations to the House under the advocacy rule required nothing less, given the dependence of the Appeal at that point on those donations.

The motion to censure Galloway was based on the narrowest of grounds. He essentially misled Parliament about the fact that he was receiving money from a foreign government, probably paid for by humanitarian funds diverted for the purpose to act as an "advocate". To this Galloway retorted that he ought to be given a medal for his actions. The Respect MP's trademark response to criticism has been to characterize it as illegitimate.



In the broader sense Galloway has escaped censure. The ideological point of view he espouses and even the methods used, are, but for certain procedural ommissions still regarded as legitimate. The Counterterrorism Blog has a roundup which puts Galloway in his proper context. He's not some deranged loner but a canny operator who has found himself a niche in a booming political market.

UK Hospital Security Must Be Tightened.
Daily Telegraph and Sky News reported on the poor security in British NHS hospitals. The Daily Telegraph stated that "Poor security in hospitals could give terrorists working in the NHS easy access to deadly chemicals and viruses, an expert warned yesterday. Hospitals are 'just as vulnerable as any nightclub', a security management specialist based in a London hospital told the Health Service Journal." Sky News reported that security management specialist stated "Most hospitals give staff cards that let them into certain areas, but it's easy to lend someone your pass...That could give them access to X-ray machines, isotopes, chemicals and disease slides. It could be days before anyone realized a virus was missing.' "

UK Security Minister: UK monitoring 30 terror cells, 2000 suspects.
Australian News reported that UK Security Minister Alan West told BBC radio that "Britain's security services believe up to 30 Islamist militant cells are plotting attacks and they are monitoring 2000 suspects and another 2000 sympathisers". Security Minister West was reported as saying: "There are 30 that are actually being looked at very closely indeed because they have got to the stage where they are gathering materials and doing things which could lead in fairly short term to doing something if they wanted to. This means that effectively about 2000 individuals are being monitored in varying degrees of closeness and probably about another 2000 loosely connected to them. The scale of this whole thing is quite dramatic."

As can be seen from the scale of the threat and the depth of their penetration even into that most elite of professions, medicine, the radicalization of Muslims intellectuals, especially in the West, continues apace. That implies that people like Galloway, however egregious and disgusting, will have a measure of protection from a very real political constituency even if he did not already have it from the Left.

Many of the British responses to the problem have been in the character of a European state. Control orders. Restrictions on travel. Speech codes. But it's not clear that these measures are winning the battle of the narrative, which as Colonel Killcullen said, is the fuel of a distributed insurgency. Galloway and the radical Islamists have a simple story with one victim, the ummah; one villain, the Shylock Jew; and one stooge; the Anglosophere which continues to do the Jew's bidding; and one duty which is Jihad.

It is the this repetitive dinning of the narrative, this return ever and again to the same storyline despite any facts it may encounter, which accounts for its persistence. Thus Galloway can say with a straight face, time after time, "I deserve a medal". Why? Because I fought for Palestinians beneath the Jewish bootheel. I opposed the War for Oil. The fact that neither of these events actually exists is beside the point. It exists from continuous assertion. It is willed into fact. I was amused, but not surprised to learn that in a certain Islamic school in Sydney, fully 80% of the students believed that the tsunami which devastated parts of Indonesia was caused by an American nuclear bomb test. In other parts of the world, it is thought that the Jews caused 9/11. That the WTC was destroyed by controlled demolition and that a missile hit the Pentagon. The narrative goes on despite any inconvenient facts. It repeats its points until they are indisputable. And not all the control orders, electronic shackles, preventive detentions and speech codes can substitute for a counternarrative. The West has gone mute from embarrassment, leaving even the chronicling of its injuries to its enemies.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

7 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Galloway is just one more bully who has shown how easily he can be bought. His principles, if any, are narcissistic in nature. His continued political life is a more important matter, for it will be a fair gauge of his constituents' awareness and concerns.

7/17/2007 08:12:00 AM  
Blogger Fen said...

Galloway is just one more bully who has shown how easily he can be bought

True. But the fact that he remains free and defiant says alot about today's society. He should be at least be forced out of government.

OBL may be right about the West. Whats worse, the corrupt weasels or those that empower/enable them?

7/17/2007 09:16:00 AM  
Blogger 3Case said...

Are Galloway and Jimmy Carter cousins of some sort?

ObL is a genocidal richboy twit who hangs with a genocidal dwarf.

7/17/2007 10:37:00 AM  
Blogger Elmondohummus said...

"... in a certain Islamic school in Sydney, fully 80% of the students believed that the tsunami which devastated parts of Indonesia was caused by an American nuclear bomb test."

I know this is only an extremely narrow point in your overall article, and that commenting on it is a slight digression from the main topic, but I still want to address it: Those students who belive that are not versed in geography. A nuclear bomb's signature is distinguishable from an earthquakes, and all that a real student - i.e. a learner truly devoted to gathering knowledge and discovering truth - would need to do to realize the lie inherent in that belief is to go to the nearest geologic survey, look at the seismometer output, and get a lesson on the differences from a trained seismologist (I found a quick mini-lesson on the differences here)

Anyway... that case you mention is an example of how ideology kills true learning. Regardless of how one feels about America, simple scientific study of the event should demonstrate what the truth is. But the students must be given an environment in which to discover it, and ideology is smothering that environment.

7/17/2007 11:34:00 AM  
Blogger Whiskey said...

Good point Wretchard, and note how power abhors a vacuum.

Galloway may be protected by his constituency, and the elite unable and unwilling to act against it, but that merely means ordinary people get blown apart in jihad.

Surrender means losing pubs, pork, women. Non-surrender means actually fighting back. So you're going to see street fights, various militias and so forth, as the State is impotent as the late Roman Empire. You can already see this with growing support in Britain for the BNP.

The counter to Galloway is the BNP. People will seek their protectors. If the State does not act against Galloway and his Muslim backers, the BNP will.

7/17/2007 12:34:00 PM  
Blogger Dr. Ferris said...

MP Galloway and ex-President Carter are entirely different people. Ex-President Carter is a Baptist idealist and pacifist that has been won over by PLO activists and the Israeli Left, with whom he negotiated the Camp David Accords and to whom he believes he owes a debt of gratitude. George Galloway was an enthusiastic sycophant for Saddam Hussein and his regime, and is an ardent Leftist and a traitor to the British government.

The former ought to be viewed as a gullible person who has become an even more gullible old man in his old age, but who is at heart idealistic and decent. The latter is an opportunistic seditionist and a paid ally of terrorists, who should be tried for his crimes and hanged.

7/17/2007 01:43:00 PM  
Blogger Pax Federatica said...

Whiskey_199: Life imitates V for Vendetta, eh? Or to be more precise, V for Vendetta's backstory, in which a far right-wing party gained control of Britain because no one else was willing or able to reverse the nation's post-apocalyptic slide into anarchy. I found that premise (present in both the graphic novel and the movie) laughably anachronistic at first, in light of the real UK's present political direction. I've been laughing less and less at it ever since.

I guess that when defending one's nation is fascist, only fascists will defend their nation. A sorry state of affairs indeed.

7/17/2007 08:12:00 PM  

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