Christopher Hitchens debates George Galloway

This is the fourth in a weekly series of documentaries and presentations designed to offer insights into today’s events, making it easy to understand them by linking them to the larger historical context. The ideas in these documentaries and presentations are not designed to advance one version of the events or act as propaganda for one party or the other, they are designed to provide the reader with enough facts to help them better understand the larger historical context to which today’s events belong. This week brings you the complete debate on the war in Iraq between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway. The debate was hosted by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, and took place last year at Baruch College in New York. George Galloway is the British MP from East London, and Christopher Hitchens is a well-known British liberal writer who lives in the United States. In this debate, Christopher Hitchens argues that the war in Iraq was not only justified, but that it was necessary, while Mr. Galloway argues that it was illegal. (Courtesy of Google Video, redistributed with permission)

collection of speeches by current and former British politicians on Lebanon

This is a collection of speeches by current and former British politicians at the cease fire demonstration for Lebanon in the UK which took place the first week end of August.

• Current Labor Party MP Diane Abbott


• Britain's Ex-Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray


• Retired Labor Party MP Tony Benn


• Respect Party MP George Galloway

George Galloways' Sky News interview on August 6, 2006

Listen to George Galloway’s take on the recent events in Lebanon. Disagree? It’s certainly your right to do so, but let’s be careful not to stifle freedom of speech, since it’s the cornerstone of Democracy, even if we don’t like what’s being said!

Click here if you have trouble with the above link (the one on the title)

A knock out punchline

I must make a confession here, and that is that I’m always captivated by a quick witted argument, let alone the person who makes it.  Irrespective of whether I agree with the person and/or the argument or not, the way in which an argument is put or a point is made goes a long way towards it’s strength and hence its acceptance.

Once upon a long ago, , before WWF, Football, boxing and other knock out sports came along, people used to debate each other in a sports-like fashion.  If you had a decent command of the language and the slightest bit of interest and knowledge of the topic at hand, you would have your adrenaline levels soaring as you follow the quiet statements which accelerate into passionate exchanges, which then culminate into full knock out punches, some of which could prove to be quite deadly to the debater’s career.

Though the theatrics are sometimes long remembered, much of what’s actually said is quickly forgotten, unless it’s so remarkable that it outlives the emotion which caused it to be said in the first place.  This is exactly the case for this statement made by Mr. George Galloway, the Respect MP for  Bethnal Green and Bow, in the context of the debate in the British Parliament on the Anglo-American extradition treaty (click here to read the full text of Mr. Galloway’s statements, and click here to view the full text of the parliamentary discussion).  

“All we want is a special relationship that does not resemble that between Miss Lewinsky and a former United States President: unequal, disreputable and with the junior partner always on their knees. That is not the kind of special relationship that we want, but as the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) powerfully made clear, it is exactly the kind of special relationship that most people in Britain think that we have with the United States of America, whether that is true or not”.

Now whether you agree with this argument or not, you have to admit it’s brilliant!  When I called and mentioned it to him on his talk show, his response was “I hope it wasn’t too much knuckles down for you”.  Anyway, if you’d like to hear more of that sort of talk, you can tune into Mr. Galloways weekly talk show On Sports Talk in Scotland.  The show is on Saturday and Sunday from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM Mountain Time.  Just go to the stations’s web site and click on the “listen live” link.  You will need to download the latest version of the Winamp player to be able to listen to the shoutcast stream.

Galloway's commons speech and BBC follow up interview

Listen to the eloquent Scotsman tell it as it is! The audio podcast in this post is the BBC channel 4 interview with Mr. Galloway, the content of which was triggered by his speech below (if you are not getting the podcast, you can click here to listen to the interview).

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From Hansard – House of Commons, 7th July , 4.29pm,
Mr. George Galloway (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Respect):
I condemn the act that was committed this morning. I have no need to speculate about its authorship. It is absolutely clear that Islamist extremists, inspired by the al-Qaeda world outlook, are responsible. I condemn it utterly as a despicable act, committed against working people on their way to work, without warning, on tubes and buses. Let there be no equivocation: the primary responsibility for this morning's bloodshed lies with the perpetrators of those acts.
However, it would be crass to do other than what the Secretary of State for Defence in a way invited us to do. We cannot separate the acts from the political backdrop. They did not come out of a clear blue sky, any more than those monstrous mosquitoes that struck the twin towers and other buildings in the United States on 9/11 2001. The Defence Secretary said that we must look at the causal circumstances behind the problems of security and defence in the world. I insist that we do so.
If Members examine our debate tomorrow in the cold light of day they will discover a self-evident truth: many Members of Parliament find it easy to feel empathy with people killed in explosions by razor-sharp red-hot steel and splintering flying glass when they are in London, but they can blank out of their mind entirely the fact that a person killed in exactly the same way in Falluja died exactly the same death. When the US armed forces, their backs guarded, as a result of a decision by our politicians, by our armed forces, systematically reduced Falluja, a city the size of Coventry, brick by brick and killed an unknown number of people—probably the number runs to thousands, if not tens of thousands—not a whisper found its way into the Chamber. I have grown used to that. I know that for many people in the House and in power in this country the blood of some people is worth more than the blood of others.
Does the House not believe that hatred and bitterness have been engendered by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the daily destruction of Palestinian homes, by the construction of the great apartheid wall in Palestine and by the occupation of Afghanistan? Does it understand that the bitterness and enmity generated by those great events feed the terrorism of bin Laden and the other Islamists? Is that such a controversial point? Is it not obvious? When I was on the Labour Benches and spoke in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I said that I despise Osama bin Laden. The difference is that I have always despised him. I did so when the Government, in this very House, gave him guns, money and encouragement, and set him to war in Afghanistan. I said that if they handled that event in the wrong way, they would create 10,000 bin Ladens. Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens at least have been created by the events of the past two and a half years? If they do, they have their head in the sand.
There are more people in the world today who hate us more intently than they did before as a result of the actions that we have taken. Does this House understand that the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison have inflamed and deepened that sense of hatred around the world and made our position more dangerous? Do Members of this House not understand that Guantanamo Bay has contributed to the sense of bitterness and hatred against us around the world? Does nobody in this House understand that when Palestinians' houses are knocked down, their olive trees cut down and their children shot by Israeli marksmen, an army of people who want to harm us is created? To say that is not to hope that they succeed—I started by making clear, I hope, my utter rejection and condemnation of the events in London this morning.
It does not matter whether Britain replaces the Trident submarine system with another. The threat now, as the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith) made clear, is not the intercontinental ballistic missiles of other countries but the asymmetrical threat of angry people who hate us and who are ready to exchange their lives for several of ours, or hundreds of ours, or thousands of ours, if they can do so. Is that really so hard to grasp?

Given that one cannot defend oneself against every angry man among the enragés of the earth, it follows that the only thing we can do is address what the Secretary of State called the causal circumstances that lie behind these events. That means trying to reduce the hatred in the world and trying to deal with the political crises out of which these events have flowed. If, instead of doing that, we remain in this consensual bubble in which we have placed ourselves, we will go on making the same mistakes over and over again. We will go on with Guantanamo Bay. We will go on as we are doing, making Abu Ghraib not smaller as we were told would happen after the photographs were published, but bigger. We will go on with occupation and war as the principal instruments of our foreign and defence policy. If we do that, some people will get through and hurt us as they have hurt us here today, and if we still do not learn the lesson, that dismal, melancholic cycle will continue.
It ought to be common sense that people start from the standpoint that the only thing that matters is whether what we plan to do will make things better or worse. I listened to the Secretary of State lay out the success story of Afghanistan and Iraq, and his account bore no relationship to the truth or reality. He talked about Afghanistan as a success story and about the President of Afghanistan, when everyone knows that Karzai is the president of the congestion charge area of downtown Kabul and no more. He talked about an Afghan army—it is a fantasy. Afghanistan is a patchwork quilt of warlordism, where the warlords' armies dwarf the so-called Afghan national army. He talked about drugs and narcotics: before we invaded the country those lunatics of the Taliban were reducing heroin production in Afghanistan, but the people whom we have put into power there have increased production by 800 per cent. Our armed forces are in Afghanistan and our taxes are being used to support a political structure that is producing 90 per cent. of the junk that ends up in the veins of our young people in Glasgow, east London and many other places in the world.
The Secretary of State talked about Iraq—as if Iraq were any kind of success story. I could not believe my ears as he described, in that complacent, orotund manner, progress over 12 months, 18 months or two years. Iraq is going backwards, not forwards. It is impossible for the Secretary of State to say we shall withdraw in any given time frame, because Iraq is getting worse, not better. There are more people being killed in Iraq now than there were before. More military operations are being conducted by the Iraqi resistance than before. Last Saturday alone, 175 military operations were mounted by the Iraqi resistance on one day.
American soldiers are dying in such numbers that there is now more appreciation of the mistake of the war in Iraq over the pond in the United States than there appears to be here in the British House of Commons. The kind of debate that we have had today would not happen in the US Congress, because US politicians understand the scale of this disaster far better than the politicians in this Chamber appear even to have begun to do.
One thousand, eight hundred American boys, conscripted by poverty, unemployment and poor opportunities, have lost their lives as a result of the pack of lies that was the case for the invasion of Iraq, and 17,000 American boys have been wounded. Ten per cent. of them are amputees, who will have to go around with no legs for the rest of their lives as a result of the pack of lies on which we went to war in Iraq.
Eighty-nine of our own boys, including the son of Rose Gentle from Glasgow, 19-year-old Gordon, were sent to die in Iraq on a pack of lies. The Prime Minister will not even meet Gordon's mother. He will not meet the mother of a 19-year-old boy who was sent to die in Iraq. Last Monday, I was on a television programme and a call came through from the mother of a 17-year-old soldier who was leaving for Iraq the following Monday. He is 17 years old, and he is being sent to Iraq, into that quagmire. The 19-year-old Gordon Gentle is dead. Eighty-eight other young men from this country are dead as a result of this, yet our Ministers roll out their jokes and their cod philosophy here today. They have absolutely no grasp of the gravity of the situation, or of how unpopular their stand has become outside these walls. They have learned nothing from the fact that they lost a million votes as a result of what they did in Iraq, or from the fact that millions in Britain marched against them and begged them not to do this.
The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), in an otherwise fine speech, described today's events as "unpredictable". They were not remotely unpredictable. Our own security services predicted them and warned the Government that if we did this we would be at greater risk from terrorist attacks such as the one that we have suffered this morning