Galloway and Livingstone: twins in so many ways

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/01/nick-cohen-george-galloway-livingstone

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On the face of it, Ken Livingstone and George Galloway could not be further apart. Livingstone is the Labour candidate in the contest to be mayor of London. The party's leaders defend him against every critic, and indulge his every excess. George Galloway hates Labour, and Labour hates him. He accuses it of being a nest of warmongers and capitalist lackeys. Labour replies that he is a dictators' stooge, and adds that he is the worst possible politician to represent the urban poor because the record of the last parliament showed he preferred mewing like a cat on a reality TV show to turning up for work in the House of Commons.

Step outside party politics, however, and the differences between the two disappear like the morning mist. For its contemptible willingness to exploit the suffering of others for the purposes of self-aggrandisement, no politician can beat Galloway's claim that his by-election victory was the "Bradford spring" – West Yorkshire's imitation of the uprisings against tyranny in the Arab world.

Galloway has bowed his head before tyrants across the Arab world. In 2005, he was the most abject of flunkies, when he praised Bashar al-Assad at Damascus University. "For me, he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country," Galloway said. "It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs, and that's why I'm proud to be here." The ruler of "the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs" is now drowning the Arab spring in the blood of Arabs, as even Galloway's supporters ought to have noticed by now.

Unsurpassable though Galloway's hypocrisy is, Livingstone has done his best to match it. Here we have a Labour candidate for mayor of London, who worked for Press TV, the propaganda channel of an Iranian theocracy that engages in the judicial murder of homosexuals, the oppression of women, the terrorising of the democratic opposition, the imprisonment of the trade union leaders British Labour politicians once supported, Holocaust denial and Jew hatred. Livingstone took the dictatorship's money and limited his taxes by pushing his earnings through a private company. I have heard many accusations against George Galloway, nearly all of them true, but no one has claimed that he had condemned tax avoiders for being "rich bastards" who "should not be allowed to vote", as the rich Livingstone did, while avoiding tax himself.

Galloway and others on the far left believe that Muslims can replace the white working class that let them down so badly by refusing to follow their orders to seize power. In his hunt for a new revolutionary proletariat, Galloway's politics have become unashamedly communalist. If a conservative politician were to seek to appeal to whites in the same manner, the left would scream "racist" until they ran out of breath and the BBC would go on a war footing.

As it was, mainstream liberals left it to the best of the British left to fight Respect in the East End of London. Instead of pretending that Islamists did not exist or did not matter, Labour MPs led by Rushanara Ali and Jim Fitzpatrick defeated Galloway and his allies from the white far left and Muslim religious right in the 2010 election by persuading working-class Muslims (and whites) that apologists for secular and religious dictatorship would never defend their interests.

Galloway's victory shows that if the secular left does not take on sectarians, they will flourish. Admittedly, the unwary thought that Galloway, a Catholic Scot, might face difficulties in playing the communalist card in the Muslim wards of Bradford West. They should not have underestimated his brass neck. Brazen and polished, it shines like a lantern through the murk. "God KNOWS who is a Muslim," he said in his election literature. "And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for: I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if you believe the other candidate in this election can say that truthfully."

Having established to his satisfaction that he was a Muslim, he told a public meeting: "I believe in the judgment day. I believe that one day we will have to answer to the Almighty." Members of the audience were to say to their friends, "especially to other religious people", how they would explain to Allah "on the last day" their failure to vote for him, George Galloway, God's chosen candidate.

Not even Rick Santorum has said: "Vote for me or you will go to hell." Galloway's exploitation of the credulous appears to be in a league of its own. But what of Livingstone? What are the games he is playing with London Jews about? He issued a kind of apology, but anyone who had followed his history of Jew-baiting suspected that he was seeking to set Muslim against Jew in the hope of securing electoral advantage.

If you doubt that he is capable of such foul behaviour, consider how he explained to Gaydar Radio his support for Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The ultra-conservative theologian has endorsed wife-beating, female genital mutilation, the murder of apostates, the murder of Jewish civilians and, of particular interest to the presenters of a gay radio station, the murder of homosexuals. No one bothers to deny his recorded utterances, apart from Livingstone, who told Gaydar that Qaradawi's fatwas <em>could</em> be a forgery perpetrated by a "Zionist organisation... run by a former Mossad agent". It's the Jewish conspiracy once again, but this time from a Labour politician, rather than the BNP.

Labour's grubby leaders bite their tongues because they hope Livingstone will help restore their fortunes by flirting with the language of sectarian strife. Some of us have been warning for a while that they and the rest of the left cannot have it both ways. They cannot condemn evangelical leaders in America and orthodox Jewish leaders in Israel for keeping their followers in a state of religious paranoia, while staying silent about the manipulation of the faithful in Britain; they cannot condemn conservatives' sexism, racism and homophobia while excusing or encouraging sexism, racism and homophobia for their own ends.

After its defeat in Bradford, Labour will be tempted to follow Livingston'e lead and outflank Galloway on the religious right. It is for this reason that it is important that Londoners reject Livingstone, not just for London's sake or Britain's sake but for the sake of the Labour party.