oh this is just what bradford needs an anti british laughing stock! he will deffo get elected

The only good thing is that as long as he is involved in Bradford he can't broadcast on Talk Shy te

He opposed sanctions on Iraq after the first Gulf War when we were stopping them sell oil and it was having a terrible effect on the economy and the Iraqi people. This was after we'd been selling them arms to fight Iran. To say he was the only person speaking up about human rights abuses abroad is bordering on the grotesque. To Saddam Hussein who had by this time massacred the Shias, the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds at various times as well as invaded Kuwait and started a war against Iran he said,
""Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."

I think he could have been a little less gushing considering he was talking to one of the great mass murderers of the century.

If you believe everything was hunky dory in the Gulf before 91 then you might be right. Galloway was raising issues nearly 10 years before this when most people thought it was just an area where a few people went & earned a lot of money & got a nice tan. He was heavily involved in War on Want in the early 80s & spoke out then. If you think the UK only started selling arms to Gulf states afer 91 you are equally wrong. I don't like anyone sucking up to unelected or elected heads of state, unless it's Mandela I suppose. That includes bigger mass murederers of a paler complexion in sharp suits & God on their side.

I'm not wrong as I never suggested anything of the sort. I explictly wrote that we(the British) had helped arm Iraq to fight Iran, a war which took place in the 1980s and during which the Iraqis used chemical weapons against Iranian troops. Hence, I made no suggestion anything was hunky dory in the Gulf pre-1991.

My point is simple, public pronouncements of support for despots whose acts of murder, gassing and torture were already in the public domain should end a political career.

Galloway has been a strong opponent of some Western hypocrisy in foreign policy and illegitimate wars in the Middle East however he is not a human rights campaigner he is simply aligned with another ideology. He is not a liberal or an advocate of free speech, when he had his radio talk shows he used to be very rude and aggressive to anybody that challenged his views, I remember one time he did a show about the Soviet Union and a left wing professor came on and challenged something he'd said about the Soviet Union and Galloway exploded, calling him a right wing neo-liberal, and cut him off. He said that the decline of the Soviet Union was the biggest regret of his lifetime and I think that sums up where he is politically, he is a supporter of the old style Communist regimes of the East, he would have been well suited to that type of dictatorship. He is intelligent and articulate and I do think he makes good points sometimes, and he has no truck for bankers and inherited privilege but I would not like to live under a Galloway society. He is also a supporter of the Iranian regime and when he does that Press TV programme you get Iranians phoning up and the moment they say the first thing that could be deemed critical of the regime Galloway denounces them and cuts them off, he is not pro-Iran he is aligned with the regime.