Reaction to Galloway’s election
As expected, the blogosphere is up in arms about George Galloway’s winning the Bethnal Green & Bow seat. I’ve made it clear in the past that I don’t think he’s a good MP or a good representative for the people he now (supposedly) represents. But I admit to being mystified by the accusations levelled at him since the election.
Galloway has been accused of introducing communal politics to this election. However, it seems that the first person to explicitly play the race card was Jeremy Paxman, who after introducing Galloway asked him:
Mr Galloway, are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?
Like, what on earth has that got to do with anything? The Muslims did not want Galloway; they wanted rid of Oona King because of her pro-war stance. They would doubtless have done the same even if the incumbent had been a white man.
They may well also have been sick of being taken for granted by the Labour party as an “in-the-bag” ethnic minority constituency. Oona King may well have been a decent MP in other areas and was known for intemperate expressions of support for Palestinians, but Blair didn’t go to war in Palestine.
People have failed to grasp the concept of the Ummah: that Muslims are one body, and that when one part is hurt, the rest feels the pain. This does not mean that we are obliged to commit treacherous acts in support of Muslims in other countries. It means that we are obliged to do what we can to prevent it. We have not had a guarantee from Blair that British troops will not be sent in support of future American adventures in Muslim countries, notably Iran and Syria. Unlike some people on the left, we don’t trust America to deliver democracy, or anything else, unless it suits them. We (and certainly I) do not believe that the possibility of some long-term benefit justifies an operation carrying certain harm (depleted uranium, bombings of innocent civilian activity, more people dragged off to faraway concentration camps, the usual indignities of military occupation).
David Gillies at Power Pundit was even more intemperate:
Very bad news. Disgusting hard-line Marxist Islamofascist Saddam-lover George Galloway has narrowly beaten Black, Jewish, pro-war Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow, entirely due to the presence of a large group of unassimilated and radicalised Bangladeshi Muslims in that constituency. Apparently this group is just fine with its co-religionists living under tyranny. Now as an MP, Galloway enjoys substantial protection from any investigation of the kickbacks he took from Oil for Food etc. Just sickening.
We never used to do ghettoes in Britain. Something needs to be done about this.
Like, where have you been? That part of east London has been a ghetto for probably well over a century. Before the Bangladeshis were there, the main ethnic population was Jewish. The Brick Lane mosque was a synagogue before, and before that it was a Huguenot chapel. And don’t forget the Afro-Carribeans of Brixton, the Portuguese of Stockwell, the Arabs of Finsbury Park, Shepherds’ Bush and North Kensington, the Nigerians of Peckham, the Somalis of Woolwich, the middle-class Jews of Golders Green, the Koreans of New Malden. London has always done ghettoes.
Melanie Phillips’ diary offers up pretty much the same nonsensical guff. She alleges that “Oliver Kamm has previously described Galloway’s Respect party, which is a Socialist Workers’ Party/radical Islamist front, as a fascist party which shares with the BNP — despite the latter’s hatred of Muslims — the same espousal of fascism, antisemitism, totalitarianism and political violence”. The bandying around of the term “fascist” has become standard, and I wonder how long it takes before “Godwin’s law” comes into force against this lazy use of an extreme insult. I worked with Respect in the run-up to last year’s election (I don’t anymore). I never met a single fascist.
I left (without telling anyone, and without even being asked about it by them) after they failed to win a single seat in last year’s local and European elections. I came to the conclusion that it was useless, and that the alliance was bound to fall apart due to the diametrically opposed views of its two main participants on just about every issue except the Iraq war. I was unimpressed by George Galloway’s threatening tone, in which, for example, he said he had told Muslims that they would be putting bullets in Palestinians’ backs by voting Labour. Islamic scholars have used the same comparisons in order to persuade Muslims to stop selling and drinking Coke – without much success, at least in London.
It’s fatuous to compare Respect with the BNP. Respect does not have the known criminal element that the BNP does (and I’m talking about their senior members, not their hangers-on in east London). I’m sure Phillips knows about what BNP members have been caught on camera saying – I’m not talking about being realistic about immigration, but about machine-gunning people outside mosques on Friday, about the grooming of white girls for sex in order to “spread Islam”, that sort of thing. I’m also sure she knows about the appalling record of BNP councillors in the few places they have been elected. (Then again, if their clueless councillors had said anything they would probably be dangerous.)
Phillips calls Oona King “despicable” on the basis of her comparing Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto and of saying of America, “It’s a f***ing f***ed-up power man, it’s a fundamentalist Christian power if we’re not careful. It’s terrifying”. The language is obviously inappropriate, but in the light of the fundamentalists who have close links with the Bush administration, the observation isn’t. She then alleges that “the Muslim community … has signed itself up to dangerous political and religious extremism as embodied by the Respect coalition”. To heighten the fear factor, she notes that the community “is numerous in that constituency” and “votes en bloc”. Shock horror – a community has enough people in one constituency to get someone into Parliament! And given that a majority of the constituency’s population is Muslim and that Galloway got just under 36% of the vote, it hardly shows the community voting en bloc.
Once again she brings in the BNP, alleging that “the odious extremism at the other end of the spectrum, in the shape of the BNP vote elsewhere, has also strengthened”, but it got 192,850 votes, which is 0.7% of the vote, and they received that percentage of the vote in London also. It is insignificant, but the fact that their share of the vote is higher in the Yorkshire and Humberside region may well have something to do with their stoking up trouble. Phillips suggests that Muslims’ voting for Galloway is “a symptom of the tide of irrationality and hatred which has overwhelmed our mainstream culture”. But the vote doesn’t come out of mainstream British culture; it comes out of one disaffected religious minority. It might be asked at this point why they didn’t vote for the Muslim Lib Dem or Tory candidates, to which I’d have to reply “I don’t know”. Ethnic minorities tend not to vote Tory, and one also has to find out what reputation these two candidates have in the community.
It seems that there is a vast section of the community who can’t live with the fact that the Muslim population in one constituency rejected the mainstream political parties and voted for someone they considered “their man” (even if he wasn’t). I’m sure they would take the same attitude even if the candidate had been an important figure in the Muslim community well-known for his services to society. I don’t have much time for Galloway anymore and it’s a shame that they relied on Respect to secure a representative in Parliament, rather than do this themselves, although I’m glad Galloway says he intends to make way for a representative from within that community at the next election. None of this justifies the attitude of Phillips and certain other commentators. Galloway won the election fair and square (he did not, as far as is known, resort to postal-vote fraud) because of a community’s discontent, and they have brought an irrelevant race issue into it. A lot of people are dissatisfied with the red/blue/yellow political arrangements in this country, and at least one community has shown that they are unwilling to shoe-horn themselves into one party or another. If that makes us unassimilated and radical, so be it.
