"Frankly unforgiveable rhetoric" posted by Richard Seymour

George Galloway has irked the pro-war Left again - which is frankly all too predictable and all too tedious and hardly ever worth discussing. One can't be forever giggling at the antics of those sliding into a second childhood. What is quite odd, however, is that the antiwar Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber, known to Blogger comments as "dsquared", has decided to make an absolute pratt of himself . Never exactly a fan of Galloway, he has appreciated the fun-filled carnival that the old rassler brings to town. No more.

The trouble, it seems, arises from the following comments Galloway made on Syrian television:

Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it.

Dsquared does a backflip (moonsault?):

[M]y reaction was that this is on the absolute cusp of being the sort of thing that a decent, liberal society ought to be chucking people in jail for.

Not 'might' or 'would' - 'ought to'. It is astonishing to then add, as a reasonable (if uncharitable) judgement on Galloway's comments:

[L]ike Enoch Powell with his River Tiber, he knows exactly what he’s fucking doing and doesn’t care.

And then:

If this was said in the UK, I would guess it would be exactly the sort of thing that would be captured by the incitement to hatred laws (either racial or religious depending on whether he’s going on about Islam or specifically Arabs).

Irony seems forever lost on this flyweight jobber. Feigning outrage at the heelish antics of his opponent, miming agony at the rhetorical jabs, histrionically reeling and spitting, he gets his tights in such a twist! Afire with babyface moralism, he declares that Powell targetting spleen at the exploited and oppressed immigrants that he actually encouraged to come to Britain is on the same moral level as targetting it at the warmongers who have siezed Iraq, and the occupiers of Gaza and the West Bank. The US and Israel are just like Muslims and Arabs, poor things.

Far be it from me to play day care assistant. I am not in the habit of apprising the helpless and clueless of the basically obvious. But a few things need pointing out. Galloway is not targeting "the foreigner" as an ethnic, religious or racial group. He is attacking imperialism. The other thing is, whether or not you think Galloway's rhetoric is overblown, what counts in such matters is whether they are designed as strategies of oppression. Powell was attempting to mobilise racists and the far right against people who had been robbed and oppressed by colonialism for centuries, and who were then being exploited and oppressed as a pool of surplus labour in the colonialist mother country. Galloway is attempting to mobilise the Middle East against people who are murdering them.

Anyone dumb enough to venture such a comparison is therefore beyond the pale, intellectually and morally - an embarrassment, even, to the antiwar movement, which dsquared occasionally links himself to. And anyone who starts to extemporise on "unforgivable rhetoric" and then utters a series of fatuities that would mantle Melanie Phillips' cheek with a blush of shame, may as well immediately lie flat on the mat and await the three count.