OT:OT:OT George Galloway's September 19, 2005 speech in Chicago
- From: "abdi" <abdi@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:56:26 GMT
I find George Galloways speech in Chicago (remember Chicago near lake
Michigan) a fitting post.
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George Galloway Tour Blog
Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington - daily blog of September 13-24 tour
George Galloway's September 19, 2005 speech in Chicago
Transcript
George Galloway, Member of the British Parliament, spoke on September 19,
2005 at
Thorne Auditorium at Northwestern University Law School, Chicago, IL as part
of a
national tour sponsored by The New Press, The Center for Economic Research
and Social
Change, International Socialist Review, and the National Council of Arab
Americans.
Loretta Capeheart, Ph.D., introduced the speakers and served as moderator.
Preceding
Mr. Galloway were Bill Davis, Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Ahmed
Shawki, Editor
of International Socialist Review and a board member of the National Council
of Arab
Americans; and Sabah Khan, a student and member of the Campus Antiwar
Network (CAN)
chapter at University of Illinois at Chicago. CAN collected donations for
hurricane
relief that a group of students took to the Gulf States.
[To ensure accuracy, any quotes from the transcript text must be compared
with the
audio of his speech. Please see Traprock's webpage on the Chicago talk to
download
the audio programs of the speech, the question and answer session, and the
introductory remarks by the above named speakers
http://www.traprockpeace.org/galloway_chi_091905.html ]
***
Thank you very much. Chair, brothers and sisters, thank you very much for
that
wonderful welcome and the introductory speakers who set the scene for this
meeting so
very ably. I want to start off this evening by telling you what I'm not here
to do
before telling you what I am.
I'm not here, and I make this point, especially as my name is George
*laughter*, I'm
not here to re-colonize you. *laughter and applause* I'm not here to tell
you Britain
knows best, though, of course, we were an imperial power for rather longer
*laughter*
than you have yet been, and, I hope, longer than you will be. I come from a
long line
of anti-imperialist parents and grandparents. I am of Irish background, and
we've
always hated the British Empire, always. *laughter and applause* In fact, I
remember
very well coming home from school once and telling my Irish grandfather that
the
teacher had said that British had an empire so vast that, upon it, the sun
never set,
and my grandfather answered, "that's because God would never trust the
English in the
dark." *laughter and applause* I've never had cause to doubt him about that.
He did
say "English." He was very clear about English, not Scottish or Welsh. And
the second
thing I'm not here to do is evince some of my critics. I've just been on Fox
TV with
Bill O'Reilly. *laughter* Unfortunately, I wasn't live because I had a few
things up
my sleeve about Bill O'Reilly. *laughter* But I'd better not go to that
bathroom
humor in a mixed audience. But for Bill O'Reilly and people like him,
somebody like
me is driven by what they call (well, he doesn't call because he doesn't use
big
words) visceral anti-Americanism. Well, I'm here to tell you that I am
probably the
only man who can say that he is the great grandson of almost certainly the
only woman
in the entire 19th century who emigrated from America to Scotland *laughter*
at a
time when thousands were sailing in the opposite direction. I think she got
on the
wrong boat, as a matter of fact, but, if she hadn't, I wouldn't be here, so
there is
nothing anti-American about me or anything I have to say this evening.
Neither are we
against the troops. I saw somebody with a t-shirt last night outside the
meeting, 25
of them in a mass demonstration of neo-cons outside the University of
Wisconsin. She
was wearing a t-shirt, "we love the troops." Well, we love the troops.
That's why we
don't want any more of them to be killed or to kill other people on a pack
of lies
from George W. Bush. *applause* After all, who are the troops? The troops
are, in
your country and mine, conscripted by unemployment, low wages, poor
prospects,
racism, recruiting sergeants in the high schools and in the car parks of the
shopping
malls, mopping up on the dissatisfaction with the lives which so many people
in
industrial and post-industrial Britain and America suffer. How could we want
those
troops to be harmed? They are our children, our brothers and sisters, our
neighbors,
our school friends, and, as I hear the Vietnam veterans say, "isn't it
always the way
that those sent in to fight in these wars are not the sons or daughters of
those who
have most to gain from those wars?" Somebody once said war is a thing where
there's a
worker on both ends of a gun. That's why we say we love the troops so much.
We're
demanding their immediate withdrawal from harm's way in Iraq, in
Afghanistan, and
wherever else Bush and Blair have sent them. *applause*
And the other thing Bill O'Reilly put to me, and I wish he'd come along to
all my
meetings, it would be good to have him in the front row shouting these
things
*laughter*, it gets the blood coursing in the veins, that I had said, he
said, that
America had brought 9/11 upon itself. Well, let me say what I did say. Not
just in
the United States but in the British Parliament, and not just now but four
days after
9/11, when the House of Commons was recalled to discuss this criminal act of
mass
murder which killed thousands of innocent people. I said, you'll forgive me
quoting
myself, I said "it may appear that these airplanes came out of a clear blue
sky, but
I believe that these monsters emerged from a deep swamp of hatred and
bitterness and
enmity which exists against us all over the world but particularly in the
Muslim
world because of the policies of injustice that we have visited upon them
for so many
years." Now I have a responsibility to say that because I know that to be
true, as
someone who has spent more than thirty years closely involved with the
Muslim world
and the Arab world in particular. I have seen that swamp. I have walked
around the
edges of that swamp. I knew that it was there before 9/11, and I knew that
something
like 9/11 was a disaster waiting to happen. And I was criticized for saying
it in New
York, but I believe that political honesty requires me to say the same thing
whichever city I'm in, whichever country I'm in whatever time it is, because
the
truth has to be told and has to be understood. *applause* We have to say,
you know,
people say *something inaudible from the crowd*, I didn't catch that, but
let me
infer what it might have been. And my apologies if it was a supportive
shout. You
see, Bill O'Reilly and the crazed fanatics like him, they want to hang Bin
Laden
around our necks. Bin Laden has nothing to do with us. Bin Laden was
invented by the
United States of America and by Great Britain *applause* and by the
countries which
gave him weapons and money. As I started quoting myself, let me finish
quoting myself
from ten years or more earlier. On the eve of the fall of Kabul to Bin Laden
and the
so-called Mujahidin had been armed and financed and bankrolled in every way,
including politically and democratically, by the United States and Great
Britain. I
said to Mrs. Thatcher and Parliament, "you have opened the gates for the
barbarians,
and a long dark night will now descend upon the people of Afghanistan. They
are the
people that took Bin Laden into Afghanistan, and then they massacred the
people of
Afghanistan for having Bin Laden in their midst. How unjust is that?" I
heard Mrs.
Bush Jr. (I'm going to come back to Mrs. Bush Sr. in a few minutes) and Mrs.
Blair on
a radio broadcast synchronized swimming in the grief of the anniversary of
9/11, and
they asked us never to forget the heart-breaking messages of farewell and
love left
by those American women on those planes from their mobile telephones on the
answering
machines of their loved ones at home. They asked us never to forget it as if
we
could. But, as I said at the time, just because Afghan women don't have
mobile
telephones, and their loved ones don't have answering machines, it doesn't
make their
deaths delivered from the sky any less obscene than the deaths of those
American
women on 9/11. *applause* But, as I looked around, the faces of the powerful
men
(mainly men) in the British Parliament whom I was addressing, I could read
from their
face that that truth which to us is self-evident was not evident to them at
all. You
see, we have to face the fact for the powerful people who rule the world,
the blood
of some people is more valuable than the blood of others. The blood of
Americans is
more valuable than the blood of Afghans. The blood of Israelis is more
valuable than
the blood of Palestinians. And the blood of Europeans is more valuable than
the blood
of Iraqis. That's a self-evident truth. There's nobody holding a minute of
silence
for the dead in Afghanistan. There's nobody even counting the dead in Iraq.
As
Powell, I think it was, said, "we can't be expected to count dead Iraqis."
And,
though this self-evident truth may not be burnt on the minds of a majority
of our
countrymen, believe me, there's not a Muslim in the whole world that doesn't
know the
double standards that we have on this subject. They know that their blood is
worth
less than ours, at least to us. And this is one of the things which waters
the swamp
of hatred that I'm talking about.
People asked me in that debate in Parliament and many times since, "well,
what would
you do? What would you have done?" The first thing I said is, whatever we
do, it must
make our position better rather than worse. If we handle this the wrong way,
we'll
create ten thousand new Bin Ladens. *applause* But if you ask me, if you
press me to
explain how we got here. Here's what I have to say. You have to, and, in the
United
States, I'm sorry to tell you, you, more than anybody, have to grasp this
simple
truth, that the floor of the heart of the crisis between east and west,
between the
Muslim world and the rest, is the half-century or more of injustice visited
upon the
Palestinian people paid for, organized, and armed by the United States of
America.
*applause* There's no getting away from that point. There's really no
getting away
from that. You see, most people in the west hardly give a second's thought
to the
Palestinian people, but Muslims think of Palestine almost every day. They
think of
Jerusalem, where the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven from the roof of
al-Aksa.
They know that Jerusalem and al-Aksa is in the hands of foreign fighters who
came
from Brooklyn or London or Paris, who talk to the CNN news in an American
accent,
talking about the fact that God promised them this spot several thousand
years before
like some kind of estate agent. *laughter* You saw them. You saw these
settlers at
Gaza having to be prized out of their luxury homes. They did get a quarter
of a
million dollars compensation, a point that was rarely made in the newscasts:
a
quarter of a million dollars each compensation. But we were being asked by
the news
to be grateful to General Sharon for giving a quarter of a million dollars
to people
from Brooklyn who were illegally occupying somebody else's land since 1967.
*applause* Seven thousand settlers occupying one third of the territory of
the Gaza
Strip, the most densely populated place on Earth, with one and a half
million
Palestinians occupying the other two thirds. Seven thousand settlers
consuming 30% of
the water in Gaza, one and a half million Palestinians, most of them living
in the
most ransid refugee camps, unimaginable unless you've been there, in some
cases
decade after decade, generation after generation. And when I watched as I
did in
agonizing detail the story of the evacuation of Gaza, I learned all over
again the
double standard that infuses this whole question and which may leave most
people in
the west unmoved but which makes the blood of all Muslims boil. General
Sharon, to
whom we must be grateful, is a man with form. Last week was the 23rd
anniversary of
the massacre of Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. When thousands of
Palestinian refugees, undefended, unarmed men of pension age, women and
children,
were butchered by the besieging Israeli forces and their Lebanese falangist,
fascist
allies, there were no men to defend them in the camps because the men had
sailed away
from the harbor of Beirut for Tunisia and . .. beyond. They have done so
under
international guarantee, a signed guarantee from the ambassador of the
United States
of America that the families they left behind would be protected, but no
sooner had
the ships sailed when these wolves fell upon the undefended refugees, who
were an
international responsibility, and massacred. Who was in charge of the
operation? Who
was literally standing at the gates of the refugee camps, literally standing
there at
the gates? The defense minister of Menachem Begin's government, General
Ariel Sharon,
the same General Ariel Sharon for whom the red carpet was rolled out in New
York at
the United Nations last week, and we were asked to congratulate him all over
again
for his sagacity in the Gaza Strip. Now when I'm talking about Sharon, I
mean, I know
he's seen differently in some parts of the world. I mean, I heard George
Bush
describing him as a man of peace. Even Sharon doesn't consider himself to be
a man of
peace. *laughter* But George Bush thinks he's a man of peace. *applause*
My friend, my comrade Ron McKay, sitting in the front row who works with me,
we met
in 1977, nearly thirty years ago in the Sabra and Shatila camps, and,
together, a few
years ago, we visited another refugee camp, this time in occupied Palestine,
called
Jenin, two days after the massacre there. It was still smoking, still
smoldering. The
dead lay unburied under the crushed masonry. The camp, one square mile in
which ten
thousand families had lived for fifty years. This camp is a particular
poignant
example of the Palestinian tragedy because, for those refugees who still had
a roof,
if they climbed up onto it, they could literally see the shining city of
Haifa on the
sea, and every one of those refugees came from that city of Haifa. So, for
fifty
years, they've lived in a rat-infested refugee camp within sight of their
own houses,
their own gardens, their own orange trees being picked by people from
London, from
Paris, from Brooklyn. Can you imagine the torture that that represents? And
then
there were massacres by General Sharon's government, and the United Nations
Security
Council unusually held an emergency meeting on a Saturday and passed a
resolution. I'm
not making this next bit up. The resolution called for Israel to allow
inspectors to
check reports of mass destruction of the lives of refugees in the camp at
Jenin, and
Sharon answered, "get stuffed. There are no United Nations inspectors coming
in
here." And the United Nations promptly got stuffed, packed their suitcases,
went
home, and nothing was ever said about the matter again. This double standard
may have
escaped the notice of most people in the west, but it didn't escape the
notice of a
single Muslim anywhere in the world. Not a single one. *applause*
Now the second thing I answered that needs to be done, if we're going to
drain that
swamp of the hatred that produced that kind of monstrosity that occurred
here on
9/11, occurred later on 7/7 in London, occurred in Madrid and many other
places, is
that we have to cease our policy of propping up virtually every puppet
president and
corrupt king who rules the Muslim world from one end to the other. Every one
of these
dictators. *applause* Again, you know, Bill O'Reilly was real shocked at
that point.
Who, us? Are you talking to us? I tell them, didn't you see the funeral of
somebody
who calls himself King Fahd? Didn't you see all the western leaders
descending on one
of the grimmest prison states in all the world, where women are not allowed
to drive,
where they may not set foot outside their door unless accompanied by a male
relative,
where nobody has ever voted for anything ever in the whole history of the
country,
when you can't even elect the secretary of a fishing club unless it becomes
contagious? This idea of elections, a country ruled by a tyrant king where
they chop
off peoples' heads in public on Friday afternoons, their blood spurting into
the sand
for the encouragement or the discouragement of the others, a country run by
a
kleptocracy whose purpose is to loot the wealth of their own country, loot
it and
spend it in the casinos, in the bordellos, in the arms bazaars, in the stock
market
and banks and speculation enterprises of western countries? Do you know that
Saudi
Arabia thinks it has six trillion dollars in American banks and in the
American stock
exchange? Of course, it only thinks that it has that money because, if it
ever dreamt
of withdrawing it, it would be confiscated overnight by any government of
the United
States. So, in fact, this money does not even belong to them, let alone
belong to
their country from whom it was looted. And all these western leaders
descended on
Riyadh. None of them breathed a word about democracy or liberty or freedom
of any
kind. They were there to kiss the nose, as a prelude to kissing somewhere
else, of
the tyrant who took the place of the tyrant they were laying in his grave.
And so
what do you think Arab Muslims, Muslims around the world think when they
hear George
Bush talking about democracy and liberty, when they see him? He may have
been going
to collect his father's latest check. George Bush Sr. has earned at least 10
million
dollars from his involvement with the Carlisle Group's handling of the
wealth of the
kleptocrats of the House of Saud. And John Major, the former British Prime
Minister,
is catching up. He's made two million. But he is a considerably younger man
with
longer to go. Anybody think the United States really wants democracy in
Saudi Arabia?
You've only got to state that question, pose it in order to answer it. If
there was a
democratically elected government in Saudi Arabia, the first thing it would
do is to
close the American bases in Saudi Arabia. Try and get at least some of their
money
back, and start investing it in their own country, which has seen income per
capita
drop from $20,000 a year 15 years ago to $7,000 a year today. And maybe even
invest a
bit of it in the rest of the Muslim world. Maybe even give a bit of it to
the
Palestinian refugees in Jenin. You've only got to ask the question in order
to answer
it. Does America really want democracy in Arabia? Fair enough. If we don't
want
democracy in Arabia, that's one thing. But don't say you want democracy next
door in
Iraq but no democracy next door in Saudi Arabia. Because you'll just seem as
a liar
and a hypocrite. *applause*
Let me give you another example . .. The somebody called President, at least
he calls
himself that, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. The United States government asks us
to believe
that one of the fruits of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is that
there's just
been the first ever free Presidential election in Egypt. In fact, President
Mubarak
himself announced that this was the first free Presidential election in
Egypt. Well,
given that he has already served four six-year terms as President, that's a
fairly
clear admission that he stole the power of the Egyptian people over the last
quarter
of a century. The point of this, President Mubarak got more votes in the
free
Presidential election than he got in the four rigged Presidential elections
beforehand. I'm not making that up. Six years ago, in a rigged Presidential
election
which he has now told us was rigged, he got 84.8% of the vote. Not bad, I
must tell
you as someone who has been fighting elections all my life. I've been quite
popular,
actually. You know, I'm really pleased if I get 50% of the vote. But Hosni
Mubarak
got 84.8% of the vote in an election he said was rigged. And, a couple of
weeks ago,
in a free election, he got 88.6% of the vote of the people of Egypt. Well,
if you
believe that, you believe anything. And it goes without saying that, if
there really
was a democratically-elected government in Egypt, it would do in a week
everything
that must be a nightmare to United States policymakers. It would close the
Israeli
embassy in Cairo. It would kick out the Mossads. It would start assisting
the
Palestinians instead of betraying them. It would once again become the
beating heart
of the Arab world, showing its leadership, showing its historic importance
instead of
being a slave state with a puppet President who rules on behalf not of his
own people
but of the governments of other countries. And so, I could go on. There are
so many
others.
I was thinking the other day about the general. Remember him, the General.
President
Bush, just before he was first elected, was being interviewed on television.
I don't
know if they showed it here, but it was endlessly shown to . .. the people
of the
world. Mr. Bush was being asked about all these foreign leaders he was going
to have
to deal with if he got elected as President of the United States. The
interviewer
asked him (it was quite bold of the interviewer, I must say), "Do you know
who the
leader of Pakistan is?" Bush answered, "Sure. The General." *laughter* The
interviewer said, "can you be a bit more specific, maybe a name?" And Bush
thought
for a moment or five, and he said, "we just call him the General."
*laughter* Don't
act so surprised. This is a man who thinks that the people who live in
Kosovo are
called Kosovarian. The people who live in Greece are called Greecians. He
thinks that
the main problem with imports in the United States is that most of them come
from
overseas. *laughter* So don't act so surprised. At least Gerald Ford could
chew a
pretzel and walk in a straight line at the same time. *applause* But, let me
tell you
about the General, because the General is the leader of a country of
hundreds of
millions of people, moreover, who now possess nuclear weapons, a fact which
doesn't
seem to have caused any consternation in the United States administration at
all.
They go to the ends of the Earth to stop other people even dreaming of
having nuclear
power, but the General, hey, he can have nuclear rockets if he likes. But
the General
came to power in a military coup. He seized power in a military coup. So
much was
this an offense against propriety that the British government immediately
suspended
him from the British commonwealth and put him on an arms embargo list. But
that was
until the day after 9/11. Then he ceased to be called the General. He
started to be
called the President, and then Mr. Bush then knew his name, and he gave him
everything that he wanted, not because he'd become any more legitimate, any
more
democratic, but because he was now an important ally of Bush in his
so-called war on
terror.
So when the Pakistanis and the Egyptians and the Saudis and Muslims around
the world
hear our governments talking about democracy and liberty and human rights,
they don't
know whether to laugh or cry, but more and more of them are crying. And, of
the many
more who are crying, some are crying tears so bitter that they're ready now
to
support others who want to hurt us, want to give their lives for many of
ours. And,
thus, the swamp becomes deeper still.
But the third main contributory factor to the growth of this swamp I'm here
to tell
you went virtually unnoticed by anybody in the west because I spent the best
years of
my life trying to raise the alarm about the mass murder of Iraqi children
under the
sanctions imposed by the United States and Great Britain on the people of
Iraq.
*applause* It was described by a fine Democratic Party congressman, David
Bonier from
Michigan, as infanticide masquerading as politics. An Iraqi child was dying
every six
minutes of every day and night. I saw them. I saw Iraq when it was a sea of
misery
with nobody looking, nobody listening. I stood at the door of a labor ward
in a
hospital in Baghdad and listened at the door to a woman giving birth by
Caesarian
Section without anesthetic, and it's a noise that haunted me every night,
year after
year, and drove me on in the campaign, I, and a very few others, great
Americans like
Kathy Kelley of Voices in the Wilderness, and very few others. I know that
most
people in the west didn't care about those Iraqi children dying, but every
Muslim
cared about those Iraqi children dying, and they couldn't understand why we
could be
so careless about those Iraqi children dying if it was not for the reason I
mentioned
at the beginning, that the blood of Arabs and Muslims is cheaper than the
blood of
other people. Because if a million children anywhere else were dying as a
result of a
policy being imposed by elected governments in the west, it is undoubtedly
true that
that policy would have come under greater attack, scrutiny, and eventually
been
changed. But that's not what happened in Iraq. Instead, we moved from the
slow
killing of the sanctions to the hot killing of the invasion and occupation
of Iraq.
And we have to keep restating these points because the media is determined
to avoid
them even now. This war was based on a pack of lies from A to Z.From the
first to the
last, it was based on a pack of lies. There were no weapons of mass
destruction.
There was no link between Iraq and the atrocities on 9/11. There was no
connection
between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but there is now. There's plenty of al-Qaeda in
Iraq now,
and who's to blame for that? Who brought al-Qaeda into Iraq, visiting upon
now the
people of Iraq the same scourge that we visited upon the people of
Afghanistan in the
1980's and early 1990's? And most pernicious of all was the lie that the
invading
armies would be welcomed by flowers and rice. This lie, told to our own
soldiers, and
there's 2,000 American boys lying in the ground now, testimony to the fact
that they
were greeted with something much hotter and much sharper than flowers and
rice.
Fifteen thousand American boys wounded, maimed, scarred forever, many of
them in
wheelchairs for the rest of their lives, for the rest of their lives in a
wheelchair,
the next sixty years in a wheelchair because of that pack of lies that sent
them into
this ignoble enterprise. And there's more than 100,000 Iraqis dead according
to Johns
Hopkins University and the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical
Association.
When I mentioned this in a debate in New York the other night, my opponent
said that
Johns Hopkins University, one of the world's finest schools, and the Lancet,
one of
the most respected journals in the world, were crazed fabricators. He really
did say
that, and I asked him to repeat it, and he repeated it, and there was a
group of
maniacs in the audience who were shouting "yes, crazed fabricators." Well,
I'll tell
you this. If I had to choose between the work of Johns Hopkins University
and the
Lancet or Christopher Hitchens and George W. Bush, I'm with Johns Hopkins
and the
Lancet. *applause* Now all these lies, all this death and destruction, the
disfiguring of the face of the international legal and political system, the
bankruptcy of the United Nations Security Council which said, "no, we won't
agree to
war," and America and Britain said, "well, you get stuffed, we're going to
have the
war anyway," the breakdown in trust that is now evidenced in the New York
Times poll
that my comrade Ahmed talked about earlier, when most people in both
countries no
longer believe in what their government tells them, their confidence in our
own
system of government perhaps fatally undermined. And all the extremism
that's been
sewn, all the new dangers that have been laid for us, I tell you, will
blight the
lives not only of every person in this room but their children and maybe
their
children yet unborn.
This is a tremendous crime, but, when the French statesman Talleyrand was
informed of
the murder of a political opponent, his aides said, "it's a terrible crime,"
and
Talleyrand answered, "yes, it's a terrible crime, but it's worse than a
crime, it's a
blunder." And that's what this enterprise is. It's a crime, but it's worth
than a
crime, it's a blunder. It's a blunder that has turned the world
up-side-down, and it's
not finished yet. If we don't withdraw the British and American armed forces
from
Iraq very soon, Iraq may plunge into an uncontrollable, unfathomable
conflagration of
civil war on a confessional and ethnic basis. You're worried about oil at
$70 a
barrel, you won't be able to buy a barrel of oil for any money at all if a
Yugoslav-style war breaks out on top of the world's biggest oil field. And
the people
that brought us here are still in charge. George Bush got re-elected - okay,
let me
rephrase that. *applause* Let me rephrase that then. George Bush is still in
power.
Tony Blaire is still in power. The generals, the intelligence chiefs, the
editors,
and the journalists who were as much a part of the invasion of Iraq as the
U.S.
Marine Corpse was *applause* are all still in power, and what are we going
to do
about it? Are we going to try and hold these people to account? We have a
chance now
to do it because things have begun to change in this country. I can sense
it. I can
smell it, feel it on the streets. First of all, when Cindy Sheehan, that
brave
mother, took to the roads *applause* and besieged that permanent holiday
home of
George Bush when he, oh, he retires there to his library. *laughter* He's
apparently
colored in most of his books already. Cindy Sheehan has set a fire burning
underneath
Bush and all these criminals who lead us here, and then, I said I'd come
back to Mrs.
Bush Sr. I tell you, the Bush administration stands naked in front of the
whole
world, and it's an ugly sight, a very ugly sight. We knew there were
malevolent
crooks, but we didn't know they were utter incompetents as well, unable to
organize
the collection of dead bodies in their own streets of their own cities a
week after a
natural disaster, unable to deploy force to rescue their own citizens but
ready at
the drop of a hat to send forces overseas to destroy other peoples'
countries and
destroy their societies. I tell you, when I helped Mrs. Bush Sr. ,you know
Marie
Antoinette just before the French Revolution, told that the people were
rioting for
they had no bread, she asked them then why don't they eat cake. Wasn't that
Barbara
Bush as they walked around the Astrodome telling these poor people they've
never had
it so good, how lucky they were, underprivileged as they were, to be in
astrodome,
dependent on food hand-outs in the richest and most powerful country in the
world? I
tell you, between Mrs. Sheehan and Mrs. Bush, things have changed here big
time, and
you have the chance to contribute to that change next Saturday. Every person
here
must be at that demonstration in Washington, D.C. *applause* It's a must, an
obligation to be here.
Now my last point is this. My favorite parliamentarian is Charles James Fox,
whose
statue is the first one you come upon as you enter the British Parliament
through the
St. Stephens entrance. Fox was expelled twice from the British Parliament,
first for
supporting the American revolution, the American freedom struggle from
colonial rule,
secondly for supporting the French Revolution. Admittedly, he spoke a little
frankly
on the second point. He tabled a motion in the British Parliament
congratulating the
people of France on the execution of their king and queen *laughter* and
looking
forward to the day when the same fate befell all the other crowned heads of
Europe.
*applause* But take yourself back in time, and imagine a conversation with
Charles
James Fox that would run like this. "Are you sure you're doing the right
thing,
helping these people? What if they win? What if they set up their own
country? What
if it ends up being run by crazed fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and
George Bush
and Richard Pearl and Dick Cheney? Don't you think that's a bit risky?"
*laughter*
Fox would have answered, "It's not my business who rules America. It's the
business
of the American people alone who rules America." *applause* He might have
said, "I
have only one choice to make, whether I'm with the foreign occupation of
their
country or whether I'm with their right to be free of that occupation of
their
country. That's the only choice that I have to make." I told you earlier I'm
of Irish
background. When the Irish people rose in 1916 at Easter time and delivered
the
decisive blow against the British empire, seizing the general post office in
O'Connell
street and proclaiming the Irish republic, there were people in London who
called
themselves progressives, sapiens, socialists even, who declined to issue a
certificate of approval for those Irish revolutionaries. Why? They said,
"these Irish
rebels are priest-ridden, bog-trotting, Gaelic, Celtic obscurantists who
want to dig
Ireland off into the mists of a Celtic Brigadoon." But they forgot that the
only
certificate of approval that was necessary was the certificate issued by the
Irish
people themselves for that revolution. *applause* That's all that is
required. And I'm
mentioning this because there are people who will say to you, "you can't
support the
freedom struggle of the people of Iraq because they might . .. be governed
by
religious people, by people with beards and turbans who don't speak or act
like us."
Maybe so. The longer we stay there, in fact, the more extreme the likely
outcome in
the end will be, but nobody can choose who rules Iraq except the people of
Iraq. And
that is a non-negotiable principle demand. *applause*
Thank you. Just a last point, and I'll shut up and take some questions. I
know I'm
speaking to a lot of people of a certain age who know the Vietnam story and
all its
gore and misery. And I'm addressing them as well as the others on this
point. Half of
the American casualties in Vietnam fell between 1968 and the end of the war.
In 1968,
the American government had already decided that it was going to have to
withdraw. In
fact, Henry Kissinger sabotaged the peace negotiations in Paris to make sure
that
Humphrey lost the election and that Nixon could win. And half of the 58,000
dead and
half of the wounded fell after the United States already knew that it had to
leave
Vietnam. I can tell you the American administration already knows it has
lost the war
in Iraq and that, the longer it stays, the deeper it will sink, and the more
blood
will be added to that swamp of hatred that I've been talking about all
night. You
know, the United States lost all those men and killed all those Vietnamese
in the
interests of a word which has now crept back into the vocabulary. It's a
dreaded
word. I hate to hear it. The word is credibility. I hear these neo-cons say,
"we can't
leave Iraq because it will destroy our credibility." That's the word that
send tens
of thousands of Americans to their graves in Vietnam. America will have to
leave Iraq
sooner or later. It's much, much better for everybody if it's sooner rather
than
later. The longer we stay there, in fact, the more extreme the likely
outcome in the
end will be, but nobody can choose who rules Iraq except the people of Iraq.
And that
is a non-negotiable principle demand. *applause*
Thank you. Just a last point, and I'll shut up and take some questions. I
know I'm
speaking to a lot of people of a certain age who know the Vietnam story and
all its
gore and misery. And I'm addressing them as well as the others on this
point. Half of
the American casualties in Vietnam fell between 1968 and the end of the war.
In 1968,
the American government had already decided that it was going to have to
withdraw. In
fact, Henry Kissinger sabotaged the peace negotiations in Paris to make sure
that
Humphrey lost the election and that Nixon could win. And half of the 58,000
dead and
half of the wounded fell after the United States already knew that it had to
leave
Vietnam. I can tell you the American administration already knows it has
lost the war
in Iraq and that, the longer it stays, the deeper it will sink, and the more
blood
will be added to that swamp of hatred that I've been talking about all
night. You
know, the United States lost all those men and killed all those Vietnamese
in the
interests of a word which has now crept back into the vocabulary. It's a
dreaded
word. I hate to hear it. The word is credibility. I hear these neo-cons say,
"we can't
leave Iraq because it will destroy our credibility." That's the word that
send tens
of thousands of Americans to their graves in Vietnam. America will have to
leave Iraq
sooner or later. It's much, much better for everybody if it's sooner rather
than
later. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. *applause*
http://www.traprockpeace.org/george_galloway_tour/?p=25
--
Quaecomque sunt vera ----
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