George Galloway is the founder and sole personality of a political party that he calls Respect. A veteran of the hard Left, he is the most prominent person in Britain to have made the transition from Communism to Islamism. Both ideologies are dictatorships in embryo and they can only be realized with violent persecution of non-believers. Their common aim here is twofold: the replacement of traditional Britain with their own political model, and the destruction of Israel. Whether as capitalists or Israelis, Jews are for it either way.
Once a Labour member of parliament, Galloway was thrown out of the party and had to resign his seat. His enthusiasm for Stalin, Castro, and Chavez then seemed freakish. On the eve of the Iraq war he sat facing Saddam Hussein on a television program and praised his courage and “indefatigability,” an odd but carefully chosen word. As though out to create an even bigger shock, he called Bashar Assad “a breath of fresh air,” and “a man of reforming zeal.” He has made a point of leading or accompanying expeditions to Gaza to campaign on behalf of Hamas while it was firing rockets into Israel.
Everything is different now because Galloway has won a by-election in the constituency of Bradford West, and re-enters parliament as an independent. The Labour Party has held this seat since 1974 and expected to do so again. But Muslims, mostly from Pakistan, have replaced the old Labour voters in huge numbers and they like Galloway’s Islamism. Presenting himself as a pseudo-Muslim, he talked about Allah and dropped Arabic words into his speeches, had posters put up in Urdu, had supporters speaking in praise of sharia, and criticized his Labour opponent, a Muslim by birth, for drinking alcohol. A landslide followed. Galloway had a majority of over 10,000 and a swing from Labour to Respect of 36 percent.
According to the media, this swing is due to the discontent of the working class who would like the Labour Party to be old-style Socialists. Class resentment is in order but Muslim separatism and racism is taboo. Reporting the news of the by-election, the BBC couldn’t bring itself even to utter the word Muslim. A senior Labour Party ex-minister could only say there was a local “problem” and refused to elaborate what that might be even though a crowd of young men with beards could be seen on television swarming round Galloway. Denial of the causes of his victory compounds its damage.
The country has previously experienced a movement that formed behind a single figure. In the 1930s Sir Oswald Mosley — also a renegade Labour member of parliament — founded the British Union of Fascists. His party worked for the replacement of traditional Britain with the Nazi model of his friends Hitler and Goebbels, and the elimination from society of Jews. Mosley was never elected to parliament as a fascist and took to the streets to get his way through violence. Galloway is the Oswald Mosley of today, a rabble-rouser every bit as ambitious, articulate and confident that Jew-hatred is central to his party. It is not yet clear whether Islamists will march and mobilize as Mosley’s Fascists did, but Galloway has given them the opportunity to be as ugly and divisive as their hateful predecessors.