[A-List] Fw: Geo of the Highland Jungle

["Christopher Black" <bar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mick Collins" <cirqueminime@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <undisclosed-recipients:>
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2003 4:46 AM
Subject: Geo of the Highland Jungle


Here's a Geo for you.  In case you missed this in yesterday's Observer,
Steppling's monitoring the English presse--all the way from Poland.  Mick
----------
De : steppling@xxxxxxxxx
Date : Mon,  7 Apr 2003 06:06:06 +0000 (UTC)
À : cirqueminime@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Objet : For your attention


My views are those of millions
I am not a traitor and I will not be gagged over this war
George Galloway
Sunday April 06 2003
The Observer


Last week the government enlisted the Murdoch press to launch an assault on
me with the journalistic equivalent of a cluster bomb. The central thrust of
their attacks, that I am a traitor not fit to sit in parliament, was
scattered over the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times. Some
bomblets were designed to wound now (like the incitement to pound me with
hate mail and threatening phone calls), others to explode later, and with
terminal effect (like the order to strip me of parliamentary rank through
withdrawal of the Labour whip, followed by expulsion).

In a world where thousands of civilians are being minced by the real thing,
this would not ordinarily detain us over-long, but both the medium and the
message are significant. That Tony Blair has taken New Labour into the outer
limits of social democratic politics, a kind of twilight zone where, in the
dimness, an axis of Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, Aznar and Sharon can just be
glimpsed, is pretty much a given. But his alliance with the cheap jingo
press, which is spreading racist hatred in this conflict, is a key
development in the war for Labour's future. This latest attack on me, for
example, was fed to a willing press by Labour sources. I know this because
the national newspaper editor who was first offered the "story" (a
transcript of a translated interview I gave to Abu Dhabi TV) turned it down
and alerted me. It was then given to the Sun. The transcribed words were
mine; the spin was all New Labour's.

The Sun (whose columnist, Richard Littlejohn, called me a "cocksucker" last
week and assaults Muslims every time he takes out his armour-plated lap-top
- "You're Shiite and you know you are") and the News of the World (which
told us yesterday that model Nell McAndrew was sending her knickers to Our
Boys at the front) are Mr Blair's new friends, and the principal
cheerleaders for his war of agression.

Mr Blair, it seems, wants free speech in Baghdad, but not in the British
parliament. He wants to use his systems of regime control - the whips, the
emasculated national executive committee and the party conference (now
dragooned more carefully than a Ceausescu mass wedding) - to ensure that
only "licensed" and low-key opposition is heard.

It's true that some of my words have been harsh, but that's because I'm
expressing the views of the millions who remain fiercely angry at the
government's taking us into a war in defiance of the UN, in the teeth of
overwhelming international opposition, on bogus and fabricated grounds, and
to such disastrous effect. Not least, I'm speaking for the many in the
British Muslim community - Shi'a or otherwise - who feel powerless and
virtually voiceless amid the slaughter of Muslims in Palestine, Afghanistan
and now Iraq.

Whole regiments of journalists and commentators have thrown objectivity to
the desert wind and signed up for the war effort, endlessly parroting
propaganda, wheeling this way and that, virtually on command. Parliamentary
sketch-writers openly deride hostile questioning in the Commons as "suicide
missions" on the part of MPs whose right, indeed duty, it is to stop our own
parliament becoming a rubber-stamp assembly like those in Baghdad and
elsewhere. The threat to discipline me is also crucially aimed at muzzling
the others in what is at risk of becoming a frenzy of intolerance, shredding
the very values for which the "coalition" claims to be fighting.

Any sense of how this illegal war is playing around the globe is now
virtually absent from public discourse; Bush and Blair have gone from being
"the west" to the "international community" to being, quite simply, the
known world. The safety of our citizens at home and abroad, the   trading
and other interests of the state and the security of the world we will be
leaving to our children are all gravely imperilled by this colonial crime
and blunder. But to say so in Blair's Airstrip One is to become, as the Sun
called me, "A traitor ... an enemy of the state".

The real traitors are those who recklessly abandoned our European heartland
and Labour's natural friends like Gerhard Schr&#246;der, Nelson Mandela and
Jimmy Carter and subordinated our interests to an extreme rightwing faction
of a foreign power; George Bush's USA. History will judge New Labour more
harshly than their fans at Wapping have done so far.

I don't want to be pushed out of Labour politics. After 35 years, and having
served at every level, I suspect I love the Labour party rather more than Mr
Blair does. I hope he will eschew a witch-hunt. But, just in case, my
friends and I are busy building the new Glasgow central constituency into an
impregnable fortress of real Labour values. Mr Blair and his peculiar
allies, his army of rightwing hacks and control-freaks, may well besiege it.
But they will have their work cut out to overcome it.

&#183; George Galloway is Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin and a columnist for
the Scottish Mail on Sunday

gallowayg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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