What is is with George Galloway?

Also, hey look over there, it's Niall Ferguson! He's here to tell us that colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to the world, and it's about time those ungrateful darkies stopped blaming the West, and those whining white liberals stopped feeling so guilty! Woot!

I absolutely agree the logic of this, but if so let the pro-war lobby - including the government - have the courage of their convictions and say so. For Blair and the right-wing press this is the truth that dare not speak its name: that they knew they were almost certainly increasing the risk of terrorist attack on the UK, but they thought that was a price worth paying. Stop insulting our intelligence by hyprocritically claiming that only "naive" people believe there is a possible and even likely connection between the war and what happened last Thursday.

The terrible dilemna here is that Iraq was never a real issue in the war on terror. It was creatively grafted on as an imagined two-fer. Saddam's Ba'athist Iraq was always a regional military and political problem and then an international problem involving the U.N. as a result of his invasion of Kuwait. You can come down on either side of the Gulf War I or sanctions debate and still have the intellectual honesty to realize that terrorism was not really the problem w/Iraq.

Now that we've dug ourselves into this hole, the prosepct of making concessions to homicidal maniacs even more crazy than our own military establishments, and not necessarily even Iraqi natives is not one that any modern politician knows how to do. Nixon couldn't get the U.S. out of Vietnam except through deceit and stealth and extended carnage. The first politician to cave will go down not only to electoral defeat but to ignominy and they all know it. To leave Iraq, which has plenty of tribal, sectarian, and regional divisions to overcome, to the murderous hands of foreign jihadis would not only be seen as cowardly by the insurgents but as faithless, fickle and shameful by those Iraqis who did welcome the fall of the Ba'athists.

The authority the terrorists use to demand that we leave Saudi, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or 'Palestine' has very little to nothing to do with the wishes of the local population, but with their own unforgiving interpretation of the Koran and their notions of history. I will grant that theirs is not an illegitimate political position, however distasteful they may seem to me in the particulars, but it's a piss-poor justification for exploding bombs in commuter trains or flying airplanes into office buildings. I cannot criticize the cynical, vengeful treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo only to turn and justify the kind of hideous violence the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda friends inflicted not only on their avowed political enemies but on any socially recalcitrant Afghans.

We need to show the carrot as well as the stick, and when we use the stick we need to use it wisely. If your going to sink so low as to kill people, the least you can do is be effective about it and Rumsfeld et al., by putting Afghanistan on the back burner, trying to occupy Iraq on the cheap, and failing to plan sufficiently ahead for either have as the evil Fouché put it (though it's commonly attributed to Talleyrand), "committed worse than a crime, (they've) committed a blunder."

Neither Rumsfeld's blunders nor Al-Qaeda's malice should prevent the U.S. nor Britain from doing the only honorable thing left, which is to try to set up as decent and stable a government as possible in Iraq, to help that nation and regime to develop, and then to pull our troops out.

i still think a little more internationalization is a good idea (most productively outside europe and probably outside the UN — neither would get involved)

It'd doubtless another thread, but this seems like nonsense.

Multiculturalism
free press
science
jews allowed to go about their business
ditto atheists, buddhists, artists, moslems
ditto women

Islamists have expressed time and time again their fundamental opposition to all of the above.

Of course supporting the war against baathists and fascists in Iraq has increased the chance of our being a target. Why would I deny that?

But that partial list is at least as much the cause.

Isn't the rule of the Taliban a test case? Haven't we seen exactly the kind of country the islamists would like to us to live under? This isn't theoreticals. We've seen a country where all of those things were prohibited, and it had NOTHING to do with grievances in the middle east, etc.

None of those things come under the heading of ligitimate greivances with the west and are not by and large held by the vast majority of muslims in the world. Things like with continuing situation in palestine and the treatment of muslims in western countries are the sort of issues that concern the vast majority of muslims.

Lee you are confusing 'Islamists' and muslims again and it really isn't helpful. There are also shades of grey in Islamism, compare and contrast, for example, the Taliban with the AK party, currently in power in Turkey and also 'Islamist'.

i think with each time jews read a free press in a multicultural area of a western city with women the number of potential terrorists doesnt increase exponentially. or, at all

But moderate moslems didn't plant the bombs (I'd be willing to bet. Who's betting against?). Moderate Moslems are causing mayhem in Iraq. Moderate moslems weren't in charge of Afghanistan. I could go on?

the ottoman empire and the caliphates were vastly different in scope, size, and politics. and as ed pointed out, there are plenty of examples of political tolerance in the ottoman empire (and i would say there are too in the various caliphates, as well). and i don't think this excuses what problems did occur, but it's not like western-style imperialism was any more "nice."

george galloway, hero to muslim supremacists

I don't find this remark remotely infamous

He was very big in the Scottish Labour Party in the late 70s, and was occasionally spoken of as a possible future leader; but when Labour started to move towards the centre he was left behind

Future leader? First I've heard. He wasn't "big" in the Scottish Labour Party so much as well known - for being a dickhead. Infamous you might say.

On its walls were posters from the Respect Party, an extremist pro-Islamic party founded by MP George Galloway, that showed Israeli soldiers pointing rifles at Palestinian children.

So, all we can glean from that article is that Respect has printed posters which show Israeli soldiers pointing rifles at Palestinian children. Is it the people who made those posters who should be chastised, then, rather than the soldiers depicted therein?

GG was elected the youngest Chairman of the Scottish Labour Party in 1981.

-- N_RQ (bl0cke...), July 11th, 2005. (later)

Hah, my immediate reaction was that Momus was comparing *himself* to Marx and Engels.

English people and Pakistanis dont blow themselves up because they are so distraught about Palestine. That's crap. Go into a politicised Mosque, read the pamphlets, watch Arabic Television. The incitement to hatred is intense. That's why Pakistanis and British people go out to kill Infidels, and it has fuck all to do with Iraq or Palestine.

Iraq, Palestine, Saudi Arabia's complicity, these are all excuses used by power-mad clerics who get their kicks from sending young men and women to their death killing People of the Book (both Books).
Used as excuses and strong rhetoric tools, aided by the likes of Ken Livingston and George Galloway who both exaggerate and romanticise the jihad in Palestine.

welcome to the jungle!

Whether you personally like the link or not—and it's a disturbing one for the politically apathetic, because it implicates us all in decisions our government has made over the years, and makes us all footsoldiers in distant wars—it is something that comes up time and again in reports of the formative thinking in the minds of the people who commit these extreme acts.

The New York Times yesterday published an article entitled Anger Burns On Fringe of Britain's Muslims. It begins:

"At Beeston's Cross Flats Park, in the center of this now embattled town, Sanjay Dutt and his friends grappled Friday with why their friend Kakey, better known to the world as Shehzad Tanweer, had decided to become a suicide bomber.

"He was sick of it all, all the injustice and the way the world is going about it," Mr. Dutt, 22, said. "Why, for example, don't they ever take a moment of silence for all the Iraqi kids who die?"

"It's a double standard, that's why," answered a friend, who called himself Shahroukh, also 22, wearing a baseball cap and basketball jersey, sitting nearby. "I don't approve of what he did, but I understand it. You get driven to something like this, it doesn't just happen."

Later:

That anger stems not merely from unhappiness with the situation of Muslims in Britain, but also solidarity with what they see as the aggressive and unjust treatment of Muslims abroad, and not least from Britain's part in the war in Iraq."