I'm very grateful to the organizers for
making this possible. I consider it a
great distinction to stand on the podium
at Baruk College named for the great
Bernard Baruk who first in 1946 proposed
that weapons of mass destruction be
placed under international inspection
and control. Um, I'm grateful to the
audience also for giving me the chance
to revisit my misspent Trosky's days.
Dishing out a leaflet in steaming heat
on the street outside made me feel and
look, I hope much
younger. And um, we're also, of course,
on this side of the house here to share
with Mr. Galloway the ambition that his
views and his uh, record be much better
known than they are. And most of you, I
hope, will have the leaflet that details
uh, this. And those of you who don't,
those of you who are watching or joining
us um from other audiences can go to
hitchens.com and download the whole lot
and I hope they will and share
it.
Um an impression I think ladies and
gentlemen has been allowed to form and
perhaps even to coagulate and to congeal
that it is only those of us who support
the regime change, the revolutionary
change in Iraq who have any explaining
to do. Um I think that that assumption
needs to be counted from the very
beginning. Uh if you examine the record
of the so-called anti-war movement in
this country and imagine what would have
happened had its council been listened
to over the last 15 and more years. You
would have a world in which the
following would be the case. Saddam
Hussein would be the owner and occupier
of Kuwait. he would have succeeded in
the annexation, not merely the invasion,
but the abolition of an Arab and Muslim
state that was a member of the Arab
League and of the United Nations. And
with these resources, as we now know,
because he lost that war, he was
attempting to equip himself with the
most terrifying arsenal that it was
possible for him to lay his hands on.
That's one consequence of anti-war
politics. That's what would have
happened. In the meanwhile, Slavadan
Mallovich would have made Bosnia part of
a greater Serbia and Kosovo would have
been ethnically cleansed and also
annexed. Uh the Taliban would be still
in power in Afghanistan if the anti-war
movement listened to and al-Qaeda would
still be their guests and Saddam Hussein
with his crime family would still be
privately holding ownership over a
terrorized people in a state that's been
most aptly described as a concentration
camp above ground and a mass grave
underneath it. Now, if I had that record
politically, I would be extremely
modest. I wouldn't be demanding
explanations from those of us who said
it's about time that we stop this
continual capitulation to dictatorship,
to racism, to aggression, and to
totalitarian ideology that we will not
allow to be repeated in Iraq the
failures in Rwanda and in Bosnia and in
Afghanistan and elsewhere. And we take
pride in having taken that position. And
we take pride in our Iraqi and Kurdish
friends who are conducting this struggle
on our behalfs, I should say.
Um, what did it mean to accept this
responsibility? We knew it was a weighty
one and we knew it was a dangerous one.
I've I've argued I will argue that the
war was both just and necessary. I think
one could separate perhaps the two uh
concepts.
Um, Iraq had lost its sovereignty as far
as a state can do under international
law. There are four conditions under
which a state may be deemed or said to
have sacrificed its sovereignty. These
are if it participates in regular
aggressions against neighboring states
or occupations of their
territory. If it violates all the letter
and spirit of the terms of the
non-prololif excuse me the nonp
proliferation treaty and in other words
fools around promiscuously with the
illegal acquisition of weapons of mass
destruction. Third, if it should violate
the genocide convention, the
signatorries to which are obliged
without further notice to act either to
prevent or to punish genocide. And
fourth, if it plays host to
international gangsters, nihilists,
terrorists, and jihadists. Iraq met all
these four conditions repeatedly and
would demonstrated its willingness to
repeat them on many occasions. Its
sovereignty was at an end. It was under
international sanctions. It was a ward
of the international community. uh its
people were being starved in order to
build palaces for their psychopathic uh
dictator and it was furthermore
imploding as a state and as a society.
The divide and rule policy of the Bath
party had led to appalling ethnic and
confessional hatreds within the country.
An imploded state would have made these
worse and you know who would have
invaded then? Turkey would have invaded
to try and take Kurdistan. Iran would
have invaded to support its extremist
Kmeniite proxies. and Saudi Arabia would
have intervened in order to do the same
favor for the Sunni and Wahhabist and
Salafist extremists. As a matter of
fact, all these three foreign
interventions are taking place at
present. All those three powers are
trying to meddle in Iraq. But we are
fortunate as are the Iraqi people that
there is a coalition to hold the ring
and to prevent it from becoming another
Rwanda or another Congo, another vortex
of violence and cruelty and
destabilization and war. And this I
think again is a point to take pride in.
It was the only responsible course. I'm
willing at any point to take questions
and I'm sure I shall be invited to about
my own criticisms of and misgivings
about differences with uh those who
conducted and conduct this policy. But
on this main on these main points, it
seems to me that there's very little
room for debate. What are the um Oh,
thank you.
Now we we know and we make no secret of
the extraordinary difficulties that have
attended this this um I think very noble
and uh risky and worthwhile enterprise.
All of you will know all of you will
have seen some of the abysmal
consequences of this. Uh but you have I
think the responsibility of imagining
what the alternative would be. I am
simply going to say what I think the
positive reasons are. Excuse me. The
positive consequences are um and I hope
someone will be showing me the time Amy
just um so I don't trespass on my own
argument or the patience of uh the
comrades. Who's going to be showing me
the time? You. Okay. When will you let
me know when I've got three minutes? Say
um positive results, ladies and
gentlemen, brothers and sisters. Um, a
man who planned and ordered and
supervised and took delight in genocide
and torture and aggression and the
occupation of two neighboring states and
the massacres of their people is in jail
now and will follow Slovador Mallovich
and Agustoa Pino into the dock quite
soon. I'm I know there are some people
here who don't take delight in this, but
I will say that I do and that it's a
long overdue
justice, a long overdue act of justice
and
mercy. Um, a constitution, a federal
democratic constitution is being debated
now as we speak with the printing of 5
million copies of a provisional document
debated on six television channels. six
and perhaps as many as a 100 newspapers
in a country where three years ago it
was death not just for you but for your
family to possess a satellite dish or to
attempt to distribute a leaflet. Death
for you and your family and not a quick
one either. Does anyone not agree that
this is a night and day
difference? I invite them to say if they
don't. the largest stateless minority in
the Middle East, the people of uh
Kurdistan, in other words, who have
suffered many years of oppression and
exile and uh and occupation in Syria, in
Iraq, in Iran, um and in in Lebanon and
in Turkey uh have begun to scramble, so
to say, to their feet to assume
something like their full height as a
people. Even before the intervention,
they were producing an autonomy, a
democracy, a self-determination of their
own in the provinces of northern Iraq,
which when I saw them last
were were a landscape of of
desolation and
depravity. You could still smell the
poison gas. You could still smell the
mass graves, the ruined cities, the
burned hillsides, the the women who had
chemical burns that still burn after
years. Out of this, the Kurds have begun
to build and help other Iraqis built
when they could have been chauvinistic.
They could have been xenophobic. They
could have said enough with with Iraq.
We're we're through with it. We're
leaving. Instead, accepted their
internationalist responsibilities.
President Talibani, it seems to me, is a
president of whom any country in the
region could be proud. not just by the
sort of comparisons one could make. This
is an extraordinary unarguable and
ambiguous gain. Um the disarmament of
Libya, the capitulation of Colonel
Gaddafi, his his abandonment of his
covert arsenal of mass weapons of mass
destruction and the walking back of the
evidence that he gave us because we all
have it now. Thank you, sir. in um in
Oakidge, Tennessee, which I think is the
right place for it. on analysis was uh
able to disclose to us that the
providence of much of this illegal
weaponry was the AQ Khan network in
Pakistan, a kind of Walmart for WMD,
Nukes are us with a line stretching all
the way from North Korea to the Iraqi
envoys who in March 2003 as the
coalition was preparing to intervene
were negotiating in Damascus with the
envoys of Kim Jong-il to buy North
Korean missiles off the shelf. And
people say Iraq and WMD can't be
mentioned in the same breath. Now not
everything about this can be attributed
to the intervention but it's noticeable
I think that Colonel Gaddafi did not
when he wanted to capitulate go to Mr.
Kofi Anaman for example or that great
statesman Mr. Jacqu Shiraak a man so
corrupt as said of Miel Dambear I think
in sentimental education so corrupt you
would willingly have paid for the
pleasure of selling himself. Um nor did
Ghard Schroeda uh the rump figure of
what was once a proud German social
democracy. No, he came to Mr. Blair and
to Mr. Bush and says, "I'm out of this
game now and you can analyze everything
I've got." That's not nothing, ladies
and gentlemen. And it's a step towards
disarmament and non-prololiferation into
the bargain. Uh and then the spread, no
less important, of the democratic
impulse within the region. Not only is
this being spread by the vector of the
Kurdish people in their revolution
because as you will you will be readily
able to find if you haven't read of it
already there have been demonstrations
in Kamishi the Kurdish main city in
northern Syria among the oppressed Kurds
who suffer under the oified theocracy of
Iran and of course in Turkey as well to
pick up the message that yes liberation
is at hand. These demonstrations broke
out on the day that President Talivani
was sworn in as president of Iran.
There's an unmistakable connection
between them. We who have been friends
of the Kurds are very proud of their
achievement and we intend to stand by
them no matter
what. I will add that the the moral
leader of the Egyptian democracy
movement, the man who has begun to break
open the argument in Egypt and who
suffered a long period of imprisonment
during this time and was written to by
Nelson Mandela as Egypt's equivalent has
told me and for quotation that in his
opinion this new mood in the in the
region would be unthinkable if it was
not for the removal of the single worst
tyrant uh who is present there. Uh
that's not nothing as in point of
testimony. That's from deep within the
bowels of the Egyptian prison system.
The man who is the moral hero of the
democracy movement. He says and I agree
with him and he's echoed by Anoir
Ibrahim as far away as Malaysia who is
the Malay equivalent and by the leader
of the socialist party of Lebanon
uh Mr. Jumblat have all stated publicly
uh that this for them is the beginning
of the end the fall of the wall as they
put it. This I think is also something
to take pride in. Now I could have said
this in front of any audience and
against any antagonist. But in my last
two minutes I will have to say that I
believe it is a disgrace that a member
of the British House of Commons should
go before the United States Senate
subcommittee and not testify but decline
to testify and to insult all those who
try to ask him questions with the most
vile and cheap gutter snipe abuse. I
think that's a disgrace.
And that's it. I've got one minute. I've
got one minute. I've got one minute. And
it is worse. It is worse than a
disgrace. If you
That's not coming. That's not coming out
of my time. If you knew how you looked
and sounded, comrades, when you do
that, well, you the cameras can take
care of it. That's not coming out of my
time. It is not just a disgrace. It is a
crime that Mr. Gaddafi has profited from
the theft of money from the Iraqi oil
for food program. Has told continuous
lies about his profitering from it and
the foul associates that he made at a
time when Iraqi children were dying and
11 billion from this program. 11 billion
went to the murderer and criminal and
sadist and fanatic Saddam Hussein.
How can anyone who's a business partner
of this regime show their face in a city
like this and not content with it? Not
content with
it. Not content with it. He turns up in
Damascus. The man's search for a
tyrannical fatherland never ends. The
Soviet Union's let him down. Albania's
gone. The Red Army's out of Afghanistan
and Czech. The hunt persists. Saddam has
been overthrown and his criminal
connections with him have been exposed.
But on to the next. On the 30th of July
in Damascus in Syria appearing, I've
given it all to you in a piece of paper
in front of Mr. Assad whose death squads
are cutting down the leaders of
democracy in Lebanon as this is going on
to tell the Syrian people they're
fortunate to have such a leader. The
slobbering Dofa who they got because
he's the son of the slobbering tyrant
who came before him. How anyone with a
teacher of socialist principle can act
or speak in this way is beyond me and I
hope ladies and gentlemen far beyond you
and far beneath your contempt. Thank
you.
[Applause]
George George Galloway, your response.
Well,
uh, chair, ladies and gentlemen,
slobbering was the note that Mr.
Hitchens chose to end on. I'm not sure
that was wise.
Bring it on. Bring it on. But, uh, I
want to
begin by praising Mr.
Hitchens in Dundee, my home
city, at the annual delegate meeting of
the National Union of
Journalists 25 years
ago. The same Mr. Hitchens made a speech
in which he praised me and the city
council for what he described as its
brave act of twinning the city of Dundee
with the Palestinian city of Nablas.
He said, "No, no,
no. Must have been someone. He said that
it was uh I didn't interrupt you, so
perhaps you'll not slobber over my
remarks.
someone
else. You see, it was very important Mr.
Hitchens support for the Palestinian
people. And it was not easy. In 1980,
only a few years before the Palestinian
resistance had seized the Israeli
Olympic Games team in Munich and had
committed what most people in the world
described as an act of mass terrorism.
Mr. Hitchen's courageous stand with
groups like the popular front for the
liberation of Palestine, the hijackers
of many an aircraft, the carrying out of
many a military operation was very
significant because it was very rare.
Equally, I want to thank Mr. Hitchens
for the brave stand that he made against
the war on Iraq in
1991. I want
to I want to say and I've never had the
chance to thank him for this. One of the
magic moments of that great
era was Christopher Hitchens on
television with the gunnut Charlton
H. When H was
fulminating, desperate to get in
there, desperate to attack, Hitchens
told him to keep his wig
on. And then he asked him magically to
name four countries with a border with
the country he was so keen to invade.
And H of course could name none. That
was important because it was very
difficult to oppose the war against Iraq
in 1991. After all, it was ruled by
somebody called Saddam Hussein.
It was governed
by the Bath party who continued to
govern it thereafter. It was only three
years since those chemical weapons that
Mr. Hitchens could still smell when he
was last there had been launched against
the Kurdish people whom he will never
leave alone. Only three years before
Halabja had taken place. And of course,
perhaps most significantly of all, it
was difficult to oppose that attack on
Iraq in 1991 because Iraq had invaded
and abolished, to quote him a few
minutes ago, a member state of the Arab
League of the United Nations, a Muslim
Arab country. Notwithstanding all of
these things, Mr.
Hitchens
bravely, fanatically you may say, stood
against the idea of President George
Bush invading Iraq in
1991. What you
are what you have witnessed
since is something unique in natural
history.
The first ever
metamorphosis from a butterfly back into
a slug.
Not bad. And
uh I mention I mentioned slug
purposefully because the one thing a
slug does leave behind it is a trail of
slime.
Now, I was brought up by my father on
the principle never to wrestle with a
chimney sweep because whatever you do,
you can't come out
clean. But you, Mr. Hitchens, are no
chimney sweep. That's not cold
dust in which you are covered.
You are covered in the stuff you like to
smear on to others. Not just me with
your gobellian leaflets full of
selective quotation, halftruth,
mistruth, and downright untruth and the
comments you made in your last two
minutes of this
speech. But people much more gentle than
me. People like Cindy
Shihan, whom you
described, whom you
described, whom you described as a sob
sister, as a flake, as a Larouchi, a
woman who gave the life of her son for
the war that you have come here to glory
in. People like Mr. Hitchens are ready
to fight to the last drop of other
people's blood and it's utterly
contemptable. Utterly and completely
contemptable. Now
uh Hitchens makes much and I know that
he will in his next segment. So I shall
to coin a phrase preempt
it of the nature and character of those
resisting the foreign invasion and
occupation in Iraq. I spoke last night
in Boston in a hall where many of the
leaders of the great American revolution
stood and spoke. My favorite member of
the British Parliament has a statue.
It's the first one you meet as you walk
in St. Steven's entry. It is a statue of
Charles James Fox. He was expelled twice
from Parliament for supporting the
American Revolution and supporting the
French
Revolution. Now, some might
say Fox was wrong supporting the
anti-colonial struggle of the American
people. After all, some might say,
"Better be careful what you wish for,
Charlie. Maybe one day that independent
free country you're supporting the birth
of will be ruled by crazed
fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and
Michael
Ashcrooft." They might have said, "Be
careful, Charlie. If this country
becomes free, it might one day not even
be able to pick up the dead bodies in
one of its most important cities a week
after they've lain there. Such as the
malevolence and incompetence of the
government which will rule
it. But Fox would have said no. Fox
would have said no. He would have said,
"The American people have a right to be
free. Who they choose to rule them is a
matter for them. Let them make their
mistakes. Let them have their own
politics. My country has no right to
occupy them any further." Now, I
am I am of Irish background myself. When
the Irish people rose in
1916 for their freedom to strike one of
the first decisive blows against the
British Empire on which the sun never
set because God would never trust the
English in the dark when the Irish
people
rose. The Hitchens of those
days in
Bloomsbury, in the salons denounced the
Irish rebels as
priestridden, bog trottting Celtic
Gaelic
obscurantists to whom they would never
issue from Bloomsbury a certificate of
approval. But the only certificate of
approval that mattered was the one
issued by the Irish people, not the
Liberals in London, who refused to
endorse it. My point is
this. For us in the United States and
the United Kingdom, there is only one
big question. Mr. Bush actually framed
it for us.
Are you
with the foreign occupation of Iraq or
are you with the right of the Iraqi
people to be free and to resist the
foreign armies who have violently
invaded them? And that's
why that's why
that cheap cheap demagoguery by Hitchens
at the beginning of this debate got the
reasonable response that it did from
this audience because he wants you to
have he wants you to make a minute
silence for the 145 today. But he can't
bring himself to mention the massacre in
Tal Afar over the last 4 days in Iraq.
He doesn't want to know about the
massacre in Fallujah when the American
armed forces brick by brick destroyed a
city and massacred thousands of people.
Now, this debate, as Amy Goodman said,
is taking place at a very important time
on a very important subject. This war in
which he
glories. Although I wish, how I wish
he'd put on a tin hat and pick up a gun
and go and fight himself. How I wish,
how I wish to see that sight.
This war in which he glories has cost
the lives according to those well-known
Saddamist fronts the Lancet and John's
Hopkins
University well in excess of a 100,000
people's lives and hundreds of thousands
more have been maimed and wounded and it
was all for a pack of lies. There were
no weapons of mass
destruction. There was no link between
Iraq and
al-Qaeda. There was no link between Iraq
and the atrocities on the 9th of
September on the 911 here in the United
States. There was no welcome for the
foreign armies that invaded Iraq. pitch
said they would be greeted by flowers,
but there are 2,000 young American boys
lying in the ground now, testimony to
the fact that they were welcomed by
something else. And thousands and
thousands more wounded, maimed, many of
them in wheelchairs for the rest of
their lives. testament to the folly of
Hitchens and Bush and Cheney and the
rest of the Neocong gang that dragged
your country into this
disaster. The
international
international legal and political system
has been defaced and disfigured. The
world has been made a more dangerous
place, not just for us, but for our
children and their children for
generations to come. The world has been
made a more dangerous place. Hitchens
asked us to believe that hundreds of
thousands of Western soldiers invading a
Muslim country would make less Islamist
fundamentalism. He asked us to believe
that devastating Iraq and making a
Yugoslavia on top of the world's biggest
oil field would make the world a safer
and more stable place. There is scarcely
a sentient being in the land who any
longer believes that the war on Iraq was
either necessary or just or a good idea.
Now,
uh, you may very well ask why so many
people wanted to come and hear and watch
and listen to two British guys debating
in the United States of America about a
war far away. I think the reason is
this. Our two countries are the biggest
rogue states in the world
today. And it is therefore vitally
important. It is therefore it is
therefore vitally important that those
who oppose the crimes of our governments
on both sides of the
Atlantic link hands, link arms, stand
shouldertosh shoulder until we've rid
the world of George W. Bush and Anthony
Blair once and for all. Thank you very
much.
Christopher Hitchens, 10 minutes. Well,
I think it's I can say that it's a sort
of a pleasure to be um insulted by Mr.
Galloway under any of my identities. Um
I've never made a speech at a
journalist's conference in uh Dundee,
for example. I don't know who does Mr.
to Galloway's research though I think I
can get Aman Macan he said on radio in
New York on Saturday Aean Macan remember
him I remember Aean Macan very well by
the way he gives me the opportunity to
say that I've been a lifelong supporter
of the reunification of Ireland and with
Edward say in uh the early years of the
inifard as early as ' 86 published a
book which you can still get from new
left books verse called blaming the
victims about the uh the struggle for
for the full establishment of
Palestinian ian rights. Um, and yes,
it's true that I was an opponent of the
last Gulf War. I don't know why anyone
thought that to make such a point was a
point against me. I dare say I might not
have been invited here in this this
battle of the Titans. If if it wasn't
tolerably well known that I think I was
probably mistaken on that occasion. If
you can assimilate a point as simil as
simple as that, ladies and gentlemen,
which I dare say you can, for I sh
insult you, then I think you'll have to
notice something about what Mr. Galloway
just said and the re the rhetorical I
won't say trick I would say squalid
maneuver that underlies it to hear him
speak you would think would you not that
he was a pacifist that he defines
himself as
anti-war now how can this be said in
good conscience by someone who has just
standing by the side of the dictator of
Syria on the 30th of July referred to
the 154 heroic operations conducted in
Iraq by the so-called
resistance. A resistance that's run, as
we know, by a senior bin Ladenist and by
many of the former secret police of the
Ba'ist regime. How can someone say and
say they're anti-war and they care about
casualties that they praise 154
operations a day? 145. I ask you 145.
He's coming down a bit. Um, no, that's
what it says. It's not that it's not
that many. Says 145 in your Let me
intro, let me remind you of what some of
those operations were.
uh the blowing up by militarygrade
explosives of the headquarters of the
United Nations in Baghdad a few months
after the intervention as it was being
tenanted by Sergio Diello, one of the
great international civil servants of
our time who was fresh from Amy knows
more about this than I, but fresh from
his role in the very belated supervision
of the independence of East Tour from
Indonesia and the holding of free
election in East Tour and the jihadists
who murdered him out communicate saying
we have today put an end to the life of
this disgusting man because he freed
Teimour from Muslim holy land in
Indonesia. These people are not
pacifists, ladies and gentlemen. Nor are
they anti-imperialists. If you haven't
noticed, they call for the restoration
of a lost empire, the caliphate, and the
imposition of Sharia law on all
non-believers within its borders. That's
not pacifism. That's not
anti-imperialism. and to praise the
people who do
this. To sully the name of Charles James
Fox, ladies and gentlemen, with such a
squalid with such a squalid enterprise
of brigandage and conquest is truly
revolting. It's almost as funny as
Michael Moore saying that the res the
Zakawi resistance in Iraq is for him the
same as the Minutemen of the American
Revolution. There comes a point, and I
think it's come by now, where what
people say is self-discrediting,
requires no more comment from me. Some
of this is funny,
okay? Some of it simply shows that the
people on the other side of this house
are not serious. The cheap laugh and the
easy joke will do for them. Of course,
it's funny that the author of the vagina
monologues puts Mr. Galloway on the
campaign trail with Jane Fonda. Who
can't laugh at
that? I know. I know a number of women
who can't wait, people who used to know
Mr. Galloway, to hear a woman talk back
to him in any way at
all, but the seriousness of it can't be
concealed. Now, among the people killed
by these heroic
operations in Iraq, some of them run
from Syria and paid for by the human
toothbrush and slobbering Doofan Assad,
Mr. Galloway's new pal. Among the
victims of these of these operations was
specialist K Casey Shien who was trying
to clean up the festering slum of what
had once been called Saddam City and was
now known to us as Sarda City where the
water supply is coming back on. It's
taking a while because people keep
blowing it up but it's coming back on.
Now I will put a simple moral
proposition to you and see if I've
phrased it all right. Is it not rather
revolting to appear in Damascus by the
side of our side and to praise the
people who killed Casey Shien and then
to come to America and appeal to the
emotions of his
mother. I I I say sincerely I didn't
think it could get as low as that. And
yes, I did criticize the the luck class,
Mrs. Shian, because she had made a very
unfortunate political statement
suggesting that she agreed with Mr. Bin
Laden that George Bush was the murderer
of her son, which is not the son. The
son, you excelpate the murderer. You
excelpate the killers right there. They
didn't kill him. Shame on you. Shame on
you for saying that.
Now, she had made an unfortunate
statement which I called her on and she
denied having made it, which was a false
claim. And she said that someone else
had magically inserted it into her
email, which is a claim equally found to
be false. All of these claims, ladies
and gentlemen, can be found to be false
by a moment's checking. If you really
believe the crazed fabricated
fabrication of the figures of 100,000
deaths in Iraq, and if you think that
only people who die in Iraq, excuse me,
that the only deaths caused in Iraq are
by coalition forces, if you're willing
to believe any or all of that, you can
simply go to my colleague Fred Kaplan's
space on slate.com. He's a very stern
and strong critic of the war, a great
opponent of mine. We've had quite a
quarrel about it. He's a great science
writer about science and other matters.
It's a simple matter to show this is
politicized hackwork of the worst kind.
The statistics in that in that case have
been conclusively and absolutely shown
to be false. And I invite anyone to
check it. Everything I say everything I
say has at least 10 pages of
documentation which I'm willing to share
behind it. And you will have your chance
to challenge me and pass questions to
Amy. Now,
um I believe that that's really all I
particularly need to say except no clap
that fast. That's cruel. That's mean. Um
except to say this about the question of
who's who in this war. Iraq is not being
occupied by President Talibani.
President Talibani was born there. He's
had to move a few times. He's seen his
villages destroyed and his home bombed
and his family shot at and murdered and
so he's not occupying Iraq. President
Talibani is in fact a leader of the
patriotic union of Kurdistan which is
the corresponding member organization of
the Socialist International. It is the
Iraqi member party of the Socialist
International. The Iraqi Communist
Party, a party with a great record of
bad politics but good civil struggle in
Iraq and with great organization among
the women and trade unionists and
journalists and workers of the country.
Has of course been a member already of
the provisional government and is
campaigning enthusiastically in the
elections. There are probably some
people among you here who fancy yourself
as having leftist revolutionary
credentials. In fact, I can tell that
you do from the zoo noises you
make and and the scars you can
demonstrate from your long underground
twilight struggle against Dick Cheney.
But while you're masturbating in that
manner, the Iraqi secular left, the
socialist and communist movements, the
workers movement, the trade unions are
fighting for their lives against the
most vicious and indiscriminate form of
fascist violence that any country in the
region has seen for a very long
time. And the full intent of that the
full intent of that was, and I'll say it
to Yes. Yes. in Fallujah was to
establish a Taliban regime and and a and
a safe house for al-Qaeda in future.
That's what we were facing. You think
you could fight that without casualties?
You're irresponsible. You're
ahistorical. We take on this side of the
house without conditions. We take our
side with the struggle of the Iraqi
Democratic and secular left against
fascism. We make no apology. Those who
have betrayed their own party, Mr.
Galloway had to be expelled from the
great labor movement of which I as I'm
myself still a member because of
advocating the shooting publicly
advocating jihad against British troops
now turns on the Iraqi left and wishes
them well as they as and wishes and
argues and hopes for their defeat by an
onslaught which would make Afghanistan
uh seem like a civilized country. What
two positions can one take about this? I
invite you to consider ladies and
gentlemen and and consider carefully.
And thank you.
I wanted to see if we could get some
wind screens on the microphones here.
Um, but failing that, if you could just
lower your microphone, Mr. Galloway, so
that you don't speak right into it.
Great. Uh, 10 minutes. George Galloway.
crazed
fabrications. John's Hopkins University
and the Lancet, the Journal of the
British Medical Association, are engaged
in crazed fabrications, politicized
fabrications. Isn't that No, crazed
fabrications. You said both. Isn't
crazed.
Well, is there anybody really in this
hall who believes
that John's that
really?
Well, you don't know what you're
supposed to believe yet. You think that
one of the You think that the academics
from one of the world's finest
universities in your own country are
crazed fabricators?
[Applause]
You think that the Lancet, the Journal
of the British Medical Association are
crazed fabricators?
I mean, how far I mean, how far how far
how far has this neocon rot seeped into
your
souls? How
far? Get it?
Now I'm going to have to deal with this
hypocrite
Hitchens. He talks about the death of
soldiers in an occupation army at the
hands of those resisting them. He
supported the Algerian resistance in its
bitter battle against French occupation
which cost a million lives.
and he supported the
LN who
conducted the most bitter, unremitting,
unrelenting military struggle which
would today be described and was then by
the French described as terrorist.
And when Ahmed Benbella, the leader of
the Algerian revolution, was asked why
he was placing bombs in baby carriages
and leaving them in the souk to explode
amongst the French forces and their
collaborators. He answered, "If the
French will give us some of their
helicopters, some of their aeroplanes,
we will give them our baby carriages."
Isn't that the same situation today that
Mr. Hitchens's friends are the ones with
all the tomahawks, all the Apaches?
Isn't it odd that they should choose as
the names of their weapons, the totems
of the Native American population that
they remorselessly massacred in
centuries gone by. The Iraqi people have
only themselves with which to fight this
foreign occupation. This hypocrite
crying tears for the American army in
Iraq supported the struggle of the
Vietnamese people from the first to the
last as they killed 58,000 American
soldiers in Vietnam. He opposed the
American war in Vietnam and supported
those fighting against it. Today, he
supports the American occupation of Iraq
and seeks to slander those fighting
against it. Now, there are al-Qaeda
elements in Iraq. Whose fault is that?
Who brought them there? How did they end
up in Iraq? There were no al-Qaeda in
Iraq before Bush and Blair attacked it.
And now every
Islamist in the
world is either on his way or dreaming
of being on his way, descending like
spores of anthrax on the gaping wounds
in Iraq created by your war. And I'll
tell you what, they'll then spill around
the world, spreading their jihad exactly
as his new, or rather old friends in
Afghanistan did. The Arab Afghans who
were sent by the American administration
to Afghanistan in the 1980s became
al-Qaeda in the 1990s and into the 21st
century.
So Mr. Hitchen's policy has succeeded in
making 10,000 new bin Ladens. He and his
friends, sorry about that, have deepened
didn't mean to do it. have deepened the
swamp. Really didn't mean of hatred out
of which these
Islamist fundamentalists are climbing.
You see, well, somebody laughs. You may
think that those airplanes in this city
on 911 came out of a clear blue sky. I
believe they emerged out of a swamp of
hatred created by us. I believe I
believe I believe.
[Applause]
I believe. You know, you
know, I
believe I believe I believe that by I
believe
[Applause]
I believe
I believe please please please I believe
be quiet that by their
unending bottomless
and total support for General Chaon's
crimes against the Palestinian people,
the United
[Music]
States. I don't think
uh I don't think your I don't think your
new friends are quite as keen on the
Palestinians as you once were.
Christopher,
I believe I believe that by propping up
by propping
up the puppet presidents and the corrupt
kings who rule the Muslim world almost
without exception from one end to the
other. Western policy has created this
swamp of hatred against us and
it it won't
matter it it won't matter how many fly
swats we invest in, how many patriot
acts we pass, how many anti-terrorist
measures we pass. If you live beside a
swamp, no amount of fly swats will
protect you from the monsters who will
come out of that swamp. We have to drain
that swamp by stopping that support for
Chaon's Israel, his apartheite wall, his
crimes against the Palestinian people.
We have to stop.
See, I tell
you, there's not not many supporters of
the Palestinians in your ranks tonight,
Mr. Hitchens. I think unless we stop
propping up these dictators in the
Muslim world, none of whom would last 5
minutes if it were not for the military,
political, and financial support of
countries like yours and mine, unless we
stop invading and occupying Arab and
Muslim
countries, then we will be forced to
endure the atrocities that took place in
New York on 911 and in London on 77 over
and over again. So if I can't reach your
heart, let me at least reach your head
in your own interests in America's own
interests. Reverse your policy towards
Israel and Palestine. Reverse your
policy towards dictators in the Muslim
world. Reverse your policy towards war
and occupation.
And we can all be safer.
[Music]
Christopher Hitchens, 5 minutes. Oh, I
had no idea. That was the appeal to the
cerebellum. That last bit was
it? Well, okay. You You'll forgive me
for pausing. I was waiting for the next
shoe to drop. Now, I I'm beginning to
find myself a little um overwhelmed by
Mr. Galloway's compliments. I don't know
where he keeps coming up with them from.
Um it's true he did once say of me that
I was the greatest living English man of
letters and pmicist and I was grateful.
I could have wished it wasn't published
in a newspaper nostalgic for the rule of
Brev, but you take your compliments
where you can. And then I might add that
if anything ignited the hatred and
violence that has uh so come to
preoccupy us in the Muslim world. I
think the uh invasion by the Soviet
Union of the entire territory of
Afghanistan, its virtual annexation as a
country and the certifiable and provable
massacre of many tens of thousands of
Afghans uh as well as the insult to
their religion is probably a better
candidate than the holding of a free
election in Iraq as a
provocation. But you see, there will
always be bloody fools who think, "Yes,
of course." Now you look at the
situation in Gaza. It makes perfect
sense to commandeer a plane load of
civilians and smash it into a building
full of civilians. Why hadn't I thought
of that before? I think you may have
noticed, Mr. Galloway, that you picked
the wrong city to say that
in. And uh arguably and um arguably the
wrong month as well because some of us
are still
mourning some of us are still mourning.
Please, please,
please. Some of us are still mourning
among among other things the the the
very large number the very large number
the very large number of Americans of
all faiths including very many Arabs and
Muslims who were killed in that
disgusting atrocity. And when you say if
we don't mend our ways
uh this will happen to us again. If you
weren't an ally of Saddam Hussein and um
and uh Bashar
al-Assad, if you had not been an ally of
the preachers of the preachers of hatred
and subversion in the region, how dare
you say the United States supports the
Assad regime in Syria, you you you say
that you that I have no brief of the
Bush administration in this, but it's
seems to me bizarre that uh someone
should say fresh from the podium with
Bashar Assad that the United States
supports all the dictators in the
region. What is this? We have in concert
for once, I must say, with the French
succeeded in gaining some part of the
recovery of the autonomy of Lebanon,
which was
under under a most corrupt and brutal
and illegal Syrian occupation. And the
leader of the le Lebanon Socialist Party
whose father was murdered by Assad. um
and the leader of the Lebanese Communist
Party whose father was murdered last
month by this Assad and all others
hailed it as a liberation. And you say
it's like the French taking over
Algeria. This is pifle sinister pitiful.
The French claim in Algeria was that
Algeria was part of France. Algerie
France says we do not say Iraq America
Iraq. We don't let alone ecos which it
might be um if uh the certain numbers of
um no I shall block that metaphor.
Excuse me. Um I came very close there.
Um it's also I think a bit much to be
told that these al-Qaeda chaps these
killers and sadists and nihilists and
producers of indiscriminate explosions
wouldn't be this way if we weren't so
mean to
them. Now it's true some of them Mr.
Zakawi, their leader, of course, the bin
Ladenist leader was in Iraq before, was
well known to have been in Iraq under
the rule of Saddam Hussein. And I can
tell you that no one gets in and out of
Iraq at that level without the president
knowing. And it's also true that a group
affiliated with him, the Ansaral Islam,
a fundamentalist group, thought that its
main job was to kill the Kurdish
leadership in northern Iraq, the elected
leadership, which is a strange target, I
think, for a holy war. And it's also
true that some of them came to Iraq
after we threw them out of Afghanistan.
Well, that's easy then. Leave them in
control of Afghanistan. Don't mess
around with these people. Don't make
them angry. Don't make them mean. It's
your fault. Now, this is massochism. Uh,
but it's being offered to you by Sades.
Okay? And someone who hasn't answered my
question, my challenge. I said in round
terms when I opened that this is not
just a matter of which of us can be the
rudest, because I already conceded that
to Mr.
or which of us can be the most cerebral
because he's already conceded that to
me. But I said that there's a further
grudge between us which is this. I say
that Mr. Galloway discussed the
allocation of oil for food profits that
stole directly from the Iraqi people and
that helped to corrupt the scheme and
program of the United Nations. I say he
discussed that personally with Mr.
Tarakaziz in Baghdad at least once. And
if he will put his name to an affidavit
that formally denies that, we can have
done with this business. But if he does
not, it's going to haunt him on every
every stop of this tour and all the way
back to England and everywhere he goes
to raise the flag of jihad in the Middle
East.
This I promise you. I promise you.
George Galloway, 5 minutes. You bring me
the affidavit. I'll sign it now. It's a
complete lie. It's a lie like the other
lies on your leaflets that you are
handing out like an idiot on the street
before this meeting. It's a lie. Buy my
book. If you don't want to buy it, go to
the website of respectcoalition.org and
read it. I've already dealt with this.
It's a lie. Nobody ever discussed oil
allocations with me. Not tariz, not
anybody. I've already said it under
oath. Never mind an affidavit. under
oath on pain of imprisonment in front of
the US Senate. That smoke screen will
not wash. You want me to run through the
dictatorships you're supporting? Do you
want me to run? Sure. Yeah. Yes. Why
not? Well, that is masochism. That
really is massochism. You want me to run
through the dictatorship in Saudi
Arabia? Yes. Get on with it. No. Do you
want me to deal with the dictatorship in
Saudi Arabia, the prison state? Do you
want me to run through the family
business more corlei than sainsbury's
that runs Kuwait? Do you want me to run
through the dictatorship in Egypt? He
has the goal to claim the election in
Egypt as a fruit of the massacre of
hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq.
Hosnim Mubarak got more votes in the
so-called free election last week than
he got in the election he admitted he
rigged six years previously. And you
want to call that
democracy. You talk about democracy in
Lebanon.