At the Court of the Bourbon Bushes.....

You have to give it to the American ruling class. When they outsource their pathologies, they hand it to the very best. Thank God this time around it was two Brits doing the dirty work. Excerpts from the Christopher Hitchens vs. George Galloway brawl:

CH: How can anyone who is a business partner of this regime show their face in a city like this? And not content with it, not content with it...... Not content with it, he turns up in Damascus. The man's search for a tyrannical fatherland never ends! The Soviet Union's let him down, Albania's gone, the red army's out of Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia. The hunt persists! Saddam has been overthrown, and his criminal connections with him have been exposed, but on to the next. On the 30th of July, in Damascus in Syria, appearing, I've given it all to you on a piece of paper. In front of Mr. Assad, whose death squads are cutting down the leaders of democracy in Lebanon, as this is going on, to tell the Syrian people they're fortunate to have such a leader. The slobbering dauphin who they got because he's the son of the slobbering tyrant who came before him. How anyone with a tincture of socialist principle can actually speak in this way is beyond me, and I hope ladies and gentleman, far beyond you and far beneath your contempt. Thank you.

Amy Goodman (moderator): George, George Galloway, your response.

GG: Well uh... Dear ladies and gentleman, slobbering was the note that Mr. Hitchens chose to end on, I'm not sure that was wise.

[Laughter]

CH: Bring it on, bring it on.

GG: But I want to begin by praising Mr. Hitchens...

In Dundee, my home city, at the annual delegate meeting of the national union of journalists, 25 years ago. The same Mr. Hitchens made a speech in which he praised me and the city council for what he described as its brave act of twinning the city of Dundee with the Palestinian city of Nablus. He said...

CH: No, no, no. Must have been someone else.

GG: He said that it was uh... I didn't interrupt you so perhaps you'll not slobber over my remarks.

[Applause]

H: Someone else.

GG: You see, it was very important Mr. Hitchens, support for the Palestinian people, and it was not easy in 1980. Only a few years before, the Palestinian resistance had seized the Israeli Olympic Games team in Munich, and had committed what most people in the world described as an act of mass terrorism. Mr. Hitchens' courageous stand with groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the hijackers of many an aircraft, the carrying out of many a military operation was very significant because it was very rare. Equally, I want to thank Mr. Hitchens for the brave stand he made against the war on Iraq in 1991.

I want to, I want to say and I've never had the chance to thank him for this. One of the magic moments of that great era was Christopher Hitchens on television with the gun-nut Charleston Heston. When Heston was fulminating, desperate to get in there, desperate to attack, Hitchens told him to keep his wig on, and then he asked him, magically, to name four countries with a border with the country he was so keen to invade. And Heston, of course, could name, none.

That was important because it was very difficult to oppose the war against Iraq in 1991, after all, it was ruled by somebody called Saddam Hussein. It was governed by the Baath party who continued to govern it thereafter. It was only three years since those chemicals weapons that Mr. Hitchens could still smell when he was last there, had been launched against the Kurdish people he will never leave alone. Only three years before Halabja had taken place. And of course, perhaps most significantly of all, it was difficult to oppose that attack on Iraq in 1991 because Iraq had invaded and abolished, to quote him a few minutes ago, a member state of the Arab League, of the United Nations, a Muslim Arab country.

Not withstanding all of these things, Mr. Hitchens bravely, fanatically you may say, stood against the idea of president George Bush invading Iraq in 1991. What you are... What you have witnessed since, is something unique in natural history. The first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug.

[Applause/Cheers]

I mention, I mention slug purposely, because the one thing a slug does leave behind it, is a trail of slime. Now, I was brought up by my father on the principle never to wrestle with a chimney sweep, because whatever you do, you can't come out clean. But you, Mr. Hitchens, are no chimney sweep. That's not coal dust in which you are covered. You are covered in the stuff you like to smear on to others. Not just me, with your Goebbelian leaflets, full of selective quotation, half-truth, mis-truth, and downright untruth, and the comments you made in your last two minutes of this speech. But people much more gentle than me, people like Cindy Sheehan. Whom you described...

[Applause]

Whom you described, whom you described as a sob-sister, as a flake, as a La Rouchie, a woman who gave the life of her son for the war you have come here to glory in. People like Mr. Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood, and it's utterly contemptible, utterly and completely contemptible. Now uh...

[Applause]

..................

That's why that cheap, cheap demagoguery by Hitchens at the beginning of this debate got the risible response that it did from this audience, because he wants you to have, he wants you to make a minute silence for the 145 today, but he can't bring himself to mention the massacre in Tal Afar over the last 4 days in Iraq. He doesn't want to know about the massacre in Fallujah when the American forces, brick by brick, destroyed a city and massacred thousands of people.

Now this debate, as Amy Goodman said, is taking place at a very important time on a very important subject. This war, in which he glories, although I wish, how I wish he would put on tin hat and pick up a gun, and go and fight himself. How I wish, how I wish to see that sight. This war in which he glories has cost the lives, according to those well known Saddamist fronts, the Lancet and Johns Hopkins University, well in excess of 100,000 peoples lives. And hundreds of thousands more have been maimed and wounded. And it was all for a pack of lies, there were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, there was no link between Iraq and the atrocities on the 9th of September, on the 9-11 here in the United States. There was no welcome for the foreign armies that invaded Iraq. Hitchens said they would be greeted by flowers, but there are 2,000 young Americans boys lying in the ground now, testimony to the fact that they were welcomed by something else. And thousands, and thousands more, wounded, maimed, many of them in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives, testament to the folly of Hitchens, and Bush, and Cheney, and the rest of the neo-con gang that dragged your country into this disaster.

CH: To hear him speak, you would think, would you not, that he was a pacifist, that he defines himself as anti-war. Now how can this be said, in good conscience, by someone who has just, standing by the side of the dictator of Syria, on the 30th of July, referred to the 154 heroic operations conducted in Iraq by the so-called resistance, or the resistance that is run as we know by a senior bin Ladenist and by many of the former secret police of the Baathist regime? How can someone say, and say they're anti-war and they care about casualties that they praise the 154 operations a day?

Now among the people killed by these heroic operations, in Iraq, some of them run from Syria and paid for by the human toothbrush and slobbering dauphin Assad, Mr. Galloway's new pal. Among the victims of these, of these operations was specialist Casey Sheehan, who was trying to clean up the festering slum of what had once been called Saddam City, and was now known to us as Sadr City where the water-supply is coming back on, it's taking a while, because people keep blowing it up, but it's coming back on. Now I will put a simple moral proposition to you and see if I've phrased it alright. Is it not rather revolting to appear in Damascus by the side of Assad and to praise the people who killed Casey Sheehan, and then to come to America and appeal to the emotions of his mother?

[Applause]

I, I say, I say sincerely I didn't think it could get as low as that, and yes I did criticize the luckless Mrs. Sheehan because she had made a very unfortunate political statement, suggesting that she agreed with Mr. bin Laden that George Bush was the murderer of her son, which is not, the son, the son...

[Jeers]

You exculpate the murderer, you exculpate the killers right there. They didn't kill him. Shame on him, shame on you for saying that.

.......................

There are probably some people among you here who fancy yourself as having leftist revolutionary credentials, as far as I can tell that you do from the zoo-noises that you make... And the scars that you can demonstrate from your long, underground, twilight struggle against Dick Cheney. But while you're masturbating in that manner, the Iraqi secular left, the socialist and communist movements, the workers' movement, the trade unions, are fighting for their lives against the most vicious and indiscriminant form of fascist violence that any country in the region has seen for a very long time.

[Applause]

And the full intent of that, the full intent of that was, and I'll say it to it, yes, yes in Fallujah was to establish a Taliban-regime and a safe-house for al-Qaeda recruiting. That's what we were facing. You think you can fight that without casualties? You're irresponsible, you're ahistorical. We take, on this side of the house, without conditions, we take our side with the struggle of the Iraqi democratic and secular left against fascism, we make no apology. Those who have betrayed their own party, Mr. Galloway had to be expelled from the great labor movement of which I was, I myself still a member, because of advocating the shooting, publicly advocating jihad against British troops, now turns on the Iraqi left and wishes them well. As they, as wishes and argues and hopes for their defeat by an onslaught which would make Afghanistan seem like a civilized country. What two positions can one take about this, I invite you to consider, ladies and gentleman, and consider carefully, and thank you.

[Applause]

G: I mean how far, I mean how far, how far, how far has this neo-con rot seeped into your souls? How far?

Now... I'm going to have to deal with this hypocrite Hitchens. He talks about the death of soldiers in an occupation army at the hands of those resisting them. He supported the Algerian resistance in its bitter battle against French occupation which cost a million lives and he supported the FLN who conducted the most bitter, unremitting, unrelenting military struggle which would be today be described and was then by the French described as terrorist. And when Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian revolution, was asked why he was placing bombs in baby carriages and leaving them in the soot to explode amongst the French forces and their collaborators, he answered, "if the French will give us some of their helicopters, some of their aero planes, we will give them our baby carriages." Isn't that the same situation today that Mr. Hitchens' friends are the ones with all the Tomahawks, all the Apaches, isn't it odd that they should chose as the names of their weapons, the totems of the native American population that they mercilessly massacred in centuries gone by?

The Iraqi people have only themselves with which to fight this foreign occupation. This hypocrite crying tears for the American army in Iraq, supported the struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first to the last as they killed 58,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. He opposed the American war in Vietnam and supported those fighting against it. Today, he supports the American occupation of Iraq and seeks to slander those fighting against it. Now there are al-Qaeda elements in Iraq, who's fault is that? Who brought them there? Who brought them there? How did they end up in Iraq? There were no al-Qaeda in Iraq before Bush and Blair attacked it, and now every Islamist in the world...

[Applause]

And someone whom hasn't answered my question, my challenge. I said in round terms when I opened that this is not just a matter of which of us can be the rudest, because I already conceded that to Mr. Galloway. Or which of us could be the most cerebral, because he has already conceded that to me. But I said that there's a further grudge between us, which is this, I say that Mr. Galloway discussed the allocation of Oil For Food profits that stole directly from the Iraqi people, and that helped to corrupt the scheme and program of the United Nations. I say he discussed that personally with Mr. Tariq Aziz in Baghdad, at least once, and if he will put his name to an affidavit, that formally denies that, we can have done with this business. But if he does not, it's going to haunt him on every stop of this tour, and all the way back to England, and everywhere he goes to raise the flag of jihad in the Middle East. This I promise you, I promise you.

[Applause/Cheers]

AG: George Galloway, five minutes.

GG: Bring me the affidavit, I'll sign it now.

CH: Very good.

GG: It's a complete lie. It's a lie like the others lies on your leaflets that you were handing out like and idiot on the street before this meeting.

It's a lie. Buy my book, if you don't want to buy it, go to the website of the RespectCoalition.org and read it. I've already dealt with this, it's a lie. Nobody every discussed oil allocations with me, not Tariq Aziz, not anybody. I've already said it under oath, never mind an affidavit, under oath on pain of imprisonment in front of the US Senate. That smokescreen will not wash. You want me to run through the dictatorships you're supporting? Do you want me to run..?

CH: Yes, sure. Yeah.

GG: Yes?

CH: Why not?

GG: That is masochism. That really is masochism. You want me to run through the dictatorships?

CH: Yes, yes, yes.

GG: Saudi Arabia.

CH: Yes, get on with it. No.

GG: Do you want me to deal with the dictatorship...

CH: No.

GG: ...of Saudi Arabia, the prison state.

Do you want me to run through the family business more Corleone than Sainsbury's that runs Kuwait?

Do you want me to run through the dictatorship in Egypt? He has the gall to claim the election in Egypt as a fruit of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq. Husni Mubarak got more votes in the so-called free election last week than he got in the election he had admitted he rigged six years previously, and you want to call that democracy.

You talk about democracy in Lebanon? Your cedar revolution? It wasn't democracy they were demanding in the square of the cedar revolution. If there was democracy in Lebanon, sheik Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, would be the president of Lebanon. But he can't be.

CH: Very interesting.

GG: He can't be the president of Lebanon. No Muslim can be the president of Lebanon. You've got to be a Christian to be the president of Lebanon. Even though only 20% of the population of Lebanon are Christians. And how did that come about? Because the United States Marines waded ashore in Beirut in 1958 to impose that constitution on the people of Lebanon. You have the gall to talk about dictatorship and democracy, Mr. Hitchens.

[Applause/Cheers]

You're, and you have the gall to talk about corruption in the Middle East. Your president and his father are complicit to the tune of millions and millions of pounds in the corruption of the Arabian Gulf in Saudi Arabia with the Carlyle Group, with secret Saudi investment in the failed business enterprises of George W. Bush. And you, a former Trotskyist, wrote in the newspapers that you were backing the re-election of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of this gang. You should be ashamed of yourself, but you're not.

CH: But I'm not.

GG: But you're not.

CH: But I'm not.

[Applause]

But, but you're not ashamed of yourself at all. It's true, I praised you. You were a butterfly. You're now a slug. You did write like an angel, but you're now working for the Devil, and damn you and all your works.

[Applause]

...........................

AG: And your response to Colin Powell saying that his UN speech was a stain on his record.

CH: I'm sorry?

AG: Your response to Colin Powell saying that his UN speech making the case of weapons of mass destruction was a stain on his record. Just a minute response.

CH: Mmm, I don't give a damn about what Colin Powell thinks about anything. I never have, and I never will. I think he's, I've noticed that he's, having being for a long time, the most overrated public figure in the United States. He's running for the nomination to most overrated man in the world. But I don't really care.

[Laughter]

CH: And you can't make me.

......................

CH: By all means. Let's see how this goes. Mr. Galloway claims that at a certain period during the 1980s he was supporting Iraqi democrats and protesting against Saddam Hussein, knowing what he was capable of, knowing what he had done, knowing the genocide for example committed in Kurdistan, and knowing of the aggressions of the chemical weaponry, that had been deployed in Iraq. He says he knows that. I've had the opportunity to check with the woman, Anne Clwyd, a very distinguished member of the Labor left in the British Parliament who was the chairman of the relevant organization that campaigned for the restoration of democratic rights in Iraq. She says she has no memory of Mr. Galloway's participation. But let's say that we take his word for it. It means that when he went, having said that he thought that Kuwait was part of the Iraqi motherland, to greet Saddam Hussein in 1994 in Iraq, and to salute him for his courage...

GG: That's another lie.

CH: ...his indefatigability...

GG: You're lying again, your nose is growing.

CH: ...he went, he went and to take his side again, it meant that he in foot on his own evidence, he went in full knowledge of the fact that he was dealing with a murderer, and a monster, and a dictator. So the pit of exculpation that you attempt to dig, Mr. Galloway, has just swallowed you up and the record will show it.

..............................

GG: ...I don't know what it was, whether it was Vanity Fair, or whether it was the lucrative contracts that you've landed since, but somehow you decided in 2003, maybe it was the whisky, maybe it was the whisky. Somehow you decided in 2003 to take a line that was the complete opposite of the line you used to take, now you want us to gloss over that point...

CH: Not at all.

GG: ...You say well... Yes you did. You said, I can't understand why so much of my time was devoted to this point. Were you lying then in 1991, or are you lying now? Were you wrong in '91, or are you wrong now? If you were wrong in '91, how should we believe you're right now in 2005. If you are capable of such drastic, dramatic, erratic swings, from being in favor of a devastating war, to being against a devastating war, to being in favor of the liberation struggle in Algeria and Vietnam and Ireland, but against the liberation struggle now in Palestine and Iraq. If you're capable...

CH: The liberation struggle?

GG: ...of such...

CH: Liberation struggle...

GG: ...dramatic, almost, if I can use the word that you used earlier, crazed shifts of opinion, how can anybody take you seriously?

[Applause]

CH: I think I can be as precise, but perhaps not as terse as Mr. Galloway on this point. Um, I should thank him by the way, for eliciting, or allowing, allowing me to elicit, or you perhaps ladies and gentleman to elicit from him, what I feared, but didn't hope, but in other words a full declaration of support for the campaign of sabotage, and murder, and beheading that has taken the lives of great journalists, that demolished...

[Boos]

... demolished the offices, demolished the offices, demolished the offices of the United Nations.

GG: Are there no depths to you which you will not sink?

CH: Demolished the offices of the United Nations and the Red Cross...

GG: Are there any depths to which you will not sink?

CH: Shot down, shot down senior clerics outside their places of worship and continues as a campaign of mayhem to this day.

GG: Are there no depths to which you will not sink? You've fallen out of the gutter into the sewer.

CH: It will be, you might all care to remember...

GG: You've fallen out of the gutter into the sewer.

CH: You might all care to remember that you are being televised, ladies and gentleman. I trust your mothers are not watching. You're shouting at me down so I can answer the question. You're unclear on the concept. Um, I will proceed if I'm allowed to. But I'm just reminding you, you're on telly, OK? Just hope your friends and relatives aren't watching.

...........................................

GG: I'm so glad Mr. Hitchens gave that answer, you see, this is where it ends, isn't it? You start off being the liberal mouthpiece of one of the most reactionary governments this country has ever seen on the subject of war. You say you've got your own liberal reasons for doing so, and you end up an apologist and a mouthpiece for those miserable, malevolent incompetents who couldn't even pick up the bodies of their own citizens in New Orleans in the aftermath of a hurricane.

[Applause]

That's where it ends. That's where it ends. You end up, you end up a mouthpiece and an apologist for the Bush family whose matriarch, you want to talk about racism? What about Barbara Bush? What about Barbara Bush who took a look at the poor, huddled, masses in the Astrodome and told us they'd never had it so good? Who told us they were better off than they'd ever been. Underprivileged people, now in an Astrodome, the only problem with whom she said was that so many of them wanted to stay in Texas. You know, Hitchens, you're a court jester. You're a court jester.

[Cheers/Applause]

Not a, not at Camelot, like other ridiculous other former liberals before you, but at the court of the Bourbon Bushes. Barbara Bush, the Marie Antoinette of modern-day American politics.

[Applause]

CH: Don't, I will advise you not to jeer these men and women while you're being televised, ladies and gentleman. I would advise you not to do it.

[Jeers/"Go home!"]

.....

What I say doesn't require your endorsement and isn't drowned by your zoo-noises because I'm on C-SPAN now, and all they can hear is you baying. That can make me out alright, so just give it up, OK? Simmer down. Or let me put it like this, it takes a bit more than that, takes a bit more than that, tough guys and gals, to shut me up as well.

I'm not a member of the Bush entourage. I've never appeared on a public platform with a dictator, I never have and I never will. I couldn't face you if I had that on my record. It must be some sordid kind of displaced guilt that makes Mr. Galloway want to throw out accusations like this. I've never done that, and to come fresh from embracing these blood-stained bastards and to say to you that it's your fault that these people hate you. It's more than we should be expected to take.

GG: But if I still have the mic, uh, I would just like to say that this issue of whether the Iraq war was necessary and just or not, is one which is already being adjudicated upon by the people who are watching on C-SPAN, by the people who'll read these proceedings this evening, in their opinion polls, in their comments of all kinds. There are very, very few friends left of the argument Mr. Hitchens has put, of course on the far shores of the crazed right-wing neo-con circles in the United States, he's a new hero. But amongst the mainstream majority, and amongst those with whom Mr. Hitchens used to travel, this subject is already adjudged. You see the Elysian Fields that he seeks to conjure up in his depiction of Iraq. Today, simply don't bear any resemblance to the situation we all see on our television screens and read about in our newspapers every day.

The situation's not getting better in Iraq, it's getting worse. Religious fundamentalism, to which he is so opposed, has been put in power in Iraq by the invasion of Bush and Blair. The grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, of whom Mr. Hitchens, it's a very bizarre Trotskyist friend of the grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that he speaks so approvingly of now, is the ruling power in Iraq and believe me he is an Islamic fundamentalist. Believe me, he wants to ensure that the people who live under his view follow every dot and comma of the Islamic fundamentalist, uh, agenda.

.......

CH: And once Mr. Galloway may have enough in his memory as a socialist, the name that he has come to disgrace so gravely, so horribly, to remember that if you take a position of solidarity with your comrades, you take it win or lose, up or down. You don't say, "Well, I'm sorry comrades, brothers and sisters, I'm going to have to desert you now." Because they might say, "Well why's that?" And I might have say, have to tell them, "Well, because Michael Moore said so" or "Because Cindy says so" or because someone's offered me some Oil For Food money to do so, and I'm not going to do it.

[Transcript from SEIXON, posted Sep. 16, 2005).