The Galloway to nowhere
Hype, hysteria and non-existent no go zones
It’s telling when you watch some left -wing new media outlets excitedly discussing the new MP for Rochdale, that they never touch on the obvious. It isn’t just that for years Galloway has taken the money of Russian autocrats and Middle Eastern despots, but that he has actively encouraged and praised the work and words of anti-Semites.
In 2015 at the last moment (and for reasons I understood) my editor at the The Times decided not to risk a column in which I accused Galloway of just this. Gorgeous George had a reputation for being litigious and successful in suing for libel and though my comment was fair and backed up by evidence, even a 10% chance of being forced into an apology felt like a humiliation that should not be hazarded.
The reason I felt that we were on safe ground was a conversation that Galloway and his fourth wife Gayatri Pertiwi had with a guest on their show which ran on the state-owned Russia Today channel until 2022.
The guest was the Israeli-born jazz musician and self-confessed “self-hating” Jew, Gilad Atzmon. So extreme had Atzmon’s Judeophobia become that by the mid noughties he was disowned by the Palestine Solidarity Committee and abandoned by Palestinian musicians who had worked with him.
To give you a flavour of Atzmon’s style, a 2003 essay contained sentiments such as this rhetorical question:
Why is it that the Jews who repeatedly demand that the Christian world should apologise for its involvement in previous persecutions, have never thought that it is about time that they apologised for killing Jesus?
This preceded a list of Jews deemed to be influential in the conduct of the Bush foreign policy along with the comment that:
Let me assure you, in Clinton's administration the situation was even worse. Even though the Jews only make up 2.9 per cent of the country's population, an astounding 56 per cent of Clinton's appointees were Jews. A coincidence? I don't think so. We have to ask ourselves what motivates American Jews to gain such political power. Is it a genuine care for American interests?
And so on. Atzmon dallied with holocaust deniers, expressed admiration for the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and generally appalled everybody except for a handful of really dumb anti-Zionist intellectuals who argued that it was impossible for a Jew to be an anti-Semite and that therefore what Atzmon was saying must somehow be OK.