September 20, 2005
\nMid-West Welcomes Galloway
\nTodd Chretien
\nOver 1,000 people filled the Wisconsin Union Theatre on Sunday night and more 600 came to Northwestern Law School\u2019s Thorne Auditorium to hear George Galloway on Monday night, making it one of the largest left-wing political meetings in years in Chicago.<\/p>\n
We were greeted in Madison by a motley crew of 25 College Republicans, which Mr. Galloway referred to as a \u201cmass demonstration of neo-cons.\u201d At least they were good for a laugh.<\/p>\n
“We’re out here with the College Republicans, making sure that people know this campus supports the troops,” UW- Madison senior Robert Thelen to Elizabeth Wachowski from the Wisconsin State Journal. “We will support the troops whether they come home tomorrow, in a year or in 10 years.”<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure the troops will be happy to hear that their non-enlisted friends will \u201csupport\u201d them in Iraq for the next decade. As Mr. Galloway said of Hitchens, \u201cpeople like that are willing to fight to the last drop of other people\u2019s blood.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Chicago, the expert technicians at Thorne hooked Mr. Galloway up to a wireless microphone, giving him the freedom to roam around the stage, inspiring a stand-up comic streak. The audience was in stitches half the time as Mr. Galloway put his collection of one-liners and witty stories, honed through thirty years of parliamentary duels, to good use.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s my favorite,<\/p>\n
“I don\u2019t believe that Mr. Bush is a Christian. Christians believe in the prophets, peace be upon them. Bush believes in profits and how to get a piece of them.”<\/p>\n
That brought the house down.<\/p>\n
But as funny as it was, the comedy was only a means to an end for Mr. Galloway. Both the Madison and Chicago speeches aimed at the serious business of convincing his American audience that our government\u2019s policies have caused unimaginable pain in the real lives of tens of millions of Muslims and Arabs all around the world.<\/p>\n
Even most anti-war activists underestimate this. Mr. Galloway illustrated this by pointing out that Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, had recently been welcomed to New York City, only days after the anniversary of the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Southern Lebanon more than two decades earlier. He asked the audience in both Madison and Chicago how many of them marked the massacre\u2019s anniversary, and while many people were very much aware of it once it was mentioned, only a very few had recalled it before hand. Mr. Galloway acknowledged this and then explained that, in the Arab and Muslim world, most people remember the day every year and remain in a permanent state of shock that Bush could call Sharon, the Israeli general who oversaw the massacre, a \u201cman of peace.\u201d Sharon himself, Galloway noted, does not consider himself a man of peace.<\/p>\n
This gap between the fuzzy consciousness on the part of the American anti-war movement of the crimes inflicted on the Arab and Muslim world by the US and the UK and the acute knowledge on the part of the victims of those crimes must be overcome.<\/p>\n
Of course, Bill O\u2019Reilly doesn\u2019t see it that way. But he was gracious enough to invite Mr. Galloway on his show. O\u2019Reilly, the loudest barking dog at Fox News, played possum, eschewing his normal \u201cshut up\u201d routine, perhaps because he was afraid he\u2019d more than meet his match in a real mano-a-mano. Instead, he said, \u201cI have seven questions for you.\u201d Of course the first one was, \u201cwhy are you such an ardent supporter of Saddam Hussein?\u201d Not exactly original, but at least it shows that someone is reading Greg Palast\u2019s blog. Mr. Galloway had no difficulty at all in knocking O\u2019Reilly shabby pitching performance out of the park. So, despite everything he\u2019s done to the contrary, we should all thank O\u2019Reilly for giving several million people the chance to hear a few actually \u201cfair and balanced\u201d ideas, at least for seven minutes.<\/p>\n
Now, we\u2019re on to walk the streets where the \u201cBattle of Seattle\u201d took place six years ago (I can still recall the distinctive odor of the tear gas mixing with the fresh Seattle air). Although the global justice movement is much stronger around the world today than in the city that popularized it, the fight continues. Thousands of Boeing workers have been on strike for weeks, desperately trying to defend thousands of jobs from the corporate axes. Mr. Galloway will be joined on the podium by one of them. You should join him in the audience. Come on down to the University of Washington-Seattle\u2019s Kane Auditorium tonight at 7pm. Tickets will be available at the door, but they\u2019re going fast.<\/p>\n
Complete details available at www.MrGallowayGoesToWashington.com<\/a><\/p>\n Todd Chretien is the Galloway National Tour Coordinator and a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" September 20, 2005 Mid-West Welcomes Galloway Todd Chretien Over 1,000 people filled the Wisconsin Union Theatre on Sunday night and more 600 came to Northwestern Law School\u2019s Thorne Auditorium to hear George Galloway on Monday night, making it one of the largest left-wing political meetings in years in Chicago. We were greeted in Madison by… Continue reading Mid-West Welcomes Galloway<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grassrootspeace.org\/traprock_video\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}