Gruesome George in His Own Words

Mary Madigan and Judith Weiss are attending the Hitchens/Galloway debate and handing out leaflets made by Gene over at Harry’s Place.
Here’s what the leaflets say.

George Galloway: No Hero for the Democratic Left
“If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.”
–George Galloway (The Guardian, 9/16/02)
“In poor third world countries like Pakistan, politics is too important to be left to petty squabbling politicians. Pakistan is always on the brink of breaking apart into its widely disparate components. Only the armed forces can really be counted on to hold such a country together… Democracy is a means, not an end in itself.”
–George Galloway on General Musharraf’s coup against the elected government in Pakistan (The Mail on Sunday, 10/17/99)
“I’m no friend of the Syrian regime, but Syrian troops in Lebanon maintain stability and protect the country from Israel. Lebanon is an Arab country with a border with the Zionist state and that is a very dangerous place.”
–George Galloway, defending Syria’s occupation of Lebanon less than five months before it ended (The Lebanon Daily Star, 12/7/04)
“Syria is exposed to foreign pressure because she represents the last castle of the Arab dignity and the Arab rights.”
–George Galloway on the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad (Arabicnews.com, 7/25/05)
“Actually, the Iraqi resistance does not target its own civilians. But the people that are being fought by the resistance in Iraq are the people that are working for the occupation.”
–George Galloway (BBC Newsnight, 1/18/05). Three days later a suicide car bomber killed 14 Shiite worshippers as they left a Baghdad mosque (The Scotsman, 1/22/05)
“I thought the President would appreciate to know that even today, three years after the war, I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam…Sir, I salute your courage, your strength your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory until Jerusalem.”
–George Galloway, flattering the mass murderer Saddam Hussein in person (The Times of London, 1/20/94)
“Mr. Tariq Aziz and thousands of political prisoners are still held illegally as hostages by the occupation authorities…He is viewed with high esteem worldwide by… international figures who have valued his counsel, met him, discussed and negotiated with him.”
–George Galloway (The Evening Standard, 4/18/05).
The UK human rights group Indict provides testimony from witnesses who saw Tariq Aziz shoot people at close range, and who report Aziz had advance knowledge of the 1988 gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja (www.indict.org.uk). Galloway has written of being on “the crowded dance floor of a North African nightclub… dancing with Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister of Iraq.” (The New Republic Online, 4/22/05)
“A civil war with massive violence on both sides.”
–George Galloway describing Saddam Hussein’s genocidal assaults on Kurds, democrats and Marsh Arabs in 1991 (“I’m Not the Only One,” Penguin Books Ltd, 2005)
“Just as Stalin industrialized the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq’s own Great Leap Forward. He managed to keep his country together until 1991. Indeed, he is likely to have been the leader in history who came closest to creating a truly Iraqi national identity, and he developed Iraq and the living, health, social and education standards of his own people.”
–George Galloway (“I’m Not the Only One,” 2005)
“The courts killed this woman and I don’t think there can be any justification for it.”
–George Galloway on the death of Terri Schiavo (BBC Question Time, 3/31/05)
“A party trick.”
–George Galloway on Iraqi trade unionists’ tearful recollections of torture at the hands of Ba’athists (The Independent, 1/7/05)
“A very, very profound connection.”
–George Galloway, describing his admiration for the Confederate Civil War general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who fought to preserve slavery, which he considered ordained by God (The Sunday Herald of Scotland, 8/7/05)