Tag: Tariq Aziz

Saddam’s buddy

hitchens1
Christopher Hitchens

Over the course of his long career in the Commons, George Galloway has become a unique figure on the British political landscape. Describing himself as a “revolutionary,” he hates Britain, hates America, hates the West, hates democracy, hates capitalism. And he hates them all so very much that he seems to love every form of despotism that represents a challenge to these things. The worst day of his life, he has said, was the day the USSR fell. As Christopher Hitchens once noted, Galloway has been involved ever since in “the pathetic search for an alternative fatherland.” He found it in Saddam’s Iraq, gushing that “just as Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq’s own Great Leap Forward.”

gallowayhussein
With Saddam

While savaging leaders in the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere in the West, Galloway was an unapologetic fan of Saddam, whom he visited twice in Baghdad. In a 1994 speech, he addressed the bloodthirsty tyrant directly, saying: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” When Saddam invaded Kuwait, Galloway defended him, calling Kuwait – counterfactually – “clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole, stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion.” He also whitewashed Saddam’s massacre of Kurds and Shias, insisting that there was “massive violence on both sides.”

gallowayusay
With Usay

In 2002, the Mail published an “interview” Galloway held with Saddam, in which their chumminess comes through vividly. He also palled around with Saddam’s son Usay, known as “The Wolf,” whose own barbaric practices include the killing of thousands of people and the torturing of athletes who didn’t perform as well as expected. Recordings exist of George and Usay joking about weight loss and putting down the U.S. “I’d like you to know,” the Scots MP promised the Iraqi tyrant’s heir, “that we are with you till the end.”

gallowayaziz
With Tariq Aziz

If he was friendly with Saddam and son, he was even closer to Saddam’s deputy premier, Tariq Aziz. While Aziz was in power, Galloway counseled him on warfare: “Don’t stand in lines, or hunker down in trenches….You will be mown down or buried alive.” When fighting a superpower, he advised, stay in motion. “I brought Tariq Aziz all the writings of Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung on the arts of revolutionary war and he had them translated into Arabic,” Galloway later claimed. “Fight a war of movement, take the uniforms off, swim among the Iraqi people and whatever their views on the regime, they will undoubtedly provide deep aquifers of support for a patriotic resistance.”

gallowaypresentingsaddamwithpennant1994
Galloway presenting Saddam with a pennant, 1994

In 2006, by which time Aziz had been taken into custody by U.S. forces, Galloway wrote him a letter of sympathy that began “Your excellency, dear brother, friend.” Describing Aziz’s detention as “cruel and unjustified,” Galloway told Aziz: “I have thought of you and of the long days and nights we spent in each other’s company….I have made many enemies in this struggle. They are your enemies also. They are my enemies because I am your friend.”

But Galloway’s Iraqi ties are only a tiny part of a very large and ugly picture. More tomorrow. 

Posted on by usefulstooges 3

George Galloway, king of the stooges?

When Naz Shah, a Labour Party politician who represents Bradford West in Parliament, stood up last year to make her first speech to her fellow MPs, she broke with the custom of praising her immediate predecessor. And with good reason.

That predecessor was George Galloway – a man only a creep would eulogize. To be sure, because of his outsized personality, colorful language, rich Scottish brogue, and constant bluster, it’s tempting to dismiss him as a cartoon version of a useful stooge, someone who’s simply too far out there to take seriously.

cohen2
Nick Cohen

As columnist Nick Cohen wrote recently, too many Brits have viewed Galloway indulgently as “a character,” a lovable clown who, whatever his foibles, is at least “passionate about his beliefs,” instead of being one of those “poll-driven, focus-group–tested on-message politicians, who speak in soundbites.” For years, complained Cohen, “Galloway was treated with an indulgence that, like a cardiogram, revealed the sicknesses at the heart of the liberal-left.” Sickness? Yes, because any man who’s enjoyed as much power and support as Galloway has, and who’s been such a faithful lapdog for the very worst of totalitarian tyrants, should be taken very seriously indeed. Galloway makes most other useful stooges look like half-hearted amateurs; he could give courses in licking the boots of international bullies, and in demonizing the virtuous and free. 

galloway1
George Galloway

Now sixty-one years old, Galloway was first elected to Parliament from Glasgow in 1987. In 2003, he was kicked out of Labour for supporting jihad against his own country’s troops and for championing the Baath Party “resistance” against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He then joined Respect – the Unity Coalition (later simply called the Respect Party) – described by Cohen as an “alliance… between the Trotskyist far left and the Islamic far right” and by Christopher Hitchens as an example of “[t]he servants of the one god finally meet[ing] the votaries of the one-party state” – and was sent back to Westminster as MP for the London neighborhood of Bethnal Green (which is 50% Muslim) and, later, beginning in 2012, for West Bradford (also heavily Muslim) in Lancashire.

hussain
Imran Hussain

In 2012, the Islamic Forum of Europe and Muslim Public Affairs Committee both took part in Galloway’s re-election campaign. Galloway publicly questioned the orthodoxy of the Muslim Labour candidate, Imran Hussain, telling “all the Muslim brothers and sisters” in his district that he himself was a teetotaler and wondering aloud whether that was true of Hussain. “I’m a better Pakistani than he will ever be,” Galloway told one audience. “God knows who’s a Muslim and who is not. And a man that’s never out of the pub shouldn’t be going around telling people you should vote for him because he’s a Muslim.” In 2015, Galloway went even lower, despicably accusing his Labour opponent, Naz Shah, of lying about having been subjected to a forced marriage when she was a girl in Pakistan.

More tomorrow.

Posted on by usefulstooges 4

Jon Snow: a history of inanity

 

mumbai-attack
The Taj Mahal Palace and Tower in Mumbai during 2008 terrorist attack

Yesterday we discussed an inane tweet sent out by Jon Snow, a news anchor on Britain’s ITN, after the death, on June 5, of Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s sometime Foreign Minister. “Nice guy in a nasty situation,” wrote Snow.

This isn’t the first time Jon Snow has expressed sympathy for tyrants or their envoys. Interviewing Fu Ying, China’s ambassador to Britain, back in 2008, he grovelled pathetically, posing such hard-hitting questions as this one: “Do you think that somehow Western concepts of freedom and democracy are simply different from Chinese concepts of freedom and democracy?” In the same year, he described the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai massacre as “practitioners,” not terrorists.

chavez22
Hugo Chávez

Then there’s Hugo Chávez. On the day the caudillo died in 2013, Jon Snow tweeted: “Whatever you think of Chavez, Latin America is far more its own continent today thanks to Lula [the former Brazilian president], Chavez, and others.” Westerners who write such things about thugs like Chávez think they’re standing up for Third World people against First World imperialism, but all they’re doing is exhibiting their own condescension, implying that the rabble in places like Venezuela are better off under gangsters who spout populist, anti-American rhetoric (and trash the economy and human rights) than under governments that provide them with more freedom and prosperity but (horrors!) may actually have friendly ties to the evil norteamericanos.

The same day, Snow also tweeted: “When I started working in Latin America the US was still killing leaders it didn’t like: Chavez is part of the order that put an end to that.” One of his Twitter followers, an obscure Texas businessman, had a sensible reply to that: “Whether you hate the US or not, the fact that Hugo survived is proof that the US is not killing those it opposes.”

Why can’t the top TV newsmen in the Western world be as clear-thinking about such matters as some businessman you’ve never heard of?

Posted on by usefulstooges 1

Snow job: A top UK journo’s sweet sayonara to Saddam’s sidekick

The tweet came on June 5. “Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz has died in jail: Nice guy in a nasty situation – made no better by Bush/Blair’s Shock and Awe.” The author of the tweet: Jon Snow. He elaborated in another tweet. “I spent time with Tariq Aziz, interviewed him often..Christian that he was – they didn’t kill him, they just let him rot to death in jail.”

snow-01[1]Who’s Jon Snow? Now 67 years old, he’s a familiar face in Britain, where he’s been a news anchor for decades, previously on Channel 4, now on ITN. And who, for those who may have forgotten, was Tariq Aziz? Yes, he was the foreign minister for Saddam Hussein, one of the most monstrous dictators of modern times. But Aziz was more than that. For one thing, he was a very close friend and trusted confidant of Saddam’s; thanks, moreover, to his many appearances on CNN, the BBC, and other international news media, he was probably, for people in the English-speaking world, the most prominent apologist for Saddam’s tyranny. As one BBC presenter put it after his death, he was “the international face of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

aziz
Tariq Aziz

It will be remembered that many of the Western journalists and diplomats who interacted with Aziz found him personally charming. This was not unusual. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, was charming, too. So was Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s prewar Foreign Minister. (Molotov, his successor, was notoriously charmless.) Journalists and diplomats interacting with such persons need to be on guard against being taken in by their charm. Snow appears oblivious to this fact.

vonribbentropp
Joachim von Ribbentrop

Snow’s tweets about Aziz drew criticism, much of it from other journalists. But he stood by his sentiments. “I can only say I interviewed him and got to know him quite well,” he told The Independent. “I think he was made the fall guy by the West. It’s a long time ago. He’s been in prison for a long time. There were plenty of people who needed to go to prison in that regime. He was one of the only ones who were picked off.” Apropos of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath, he added: “It’s an absolute tragic morass in which everybody has behave[d] badly. What was the idea of going in and smashing that place? It meant Christians couldn’t stay. It meant Jews couldn’t stay. He was picked off because he was a Christian. It’s all tricky stuff – so complicated.”

Tariq-Aziz-with-Saddam-Hu-006
Aziz with Saddam Hussein in happier times

One might prefer simply to back away from that mishmash of inane remarks, but given Snow’s prominence and influence, it is perhaps salutary to pause for a moment and notice what Snow is doing in his tweets and his follow-up comments. For one thing, he’s not denying Aziz’s involvement in Saddam’s unspeakable atrocities; he’s simply taking the view that since Aziz was only one of many vile creatures whose hands were soaked with the blood of tortured women and children, why jail him when others were allowed to walk away? For another, the reference to Saddam’s nightmare society of torture chambers and mass graves as a “nasty situation” is a world-class understatement. And by describing the situation in Iraq as a “tricky” and “complicated” one in which “everybody has behave[d] badly,” and by focusing on the purported offenses of “the West,” which in his description went in and “smash[ed]” Iraq and made Iraq’s predicament “no better,” Snow is playing moral-equivalency games of the lowest order.

Posted on by usefulstooges 0