Politicians say the darnest things

[IllegalArgument]

British MP George Galloway visited the middle east and had a few things to say.

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.

Butterfiles and Wheels has a few links to this story.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/

There are some other good whoppers in the transcripts...
http://www.memritv.com/Transcript.asp?P1=788

And here I thought the US had the monopoly on idiot politicians.

 

[richardm]

Wow. He certainly does seem to get more obnoxious by the day:

Mr Galloway claimed the insurgents were ordinary Iraqis defending their country against "foreign invaders".

"It can be said, truly said, that the Iraqi resistance is not just defending Iraq. They are defending all the Arabs and they are defending all the people of the world against American hegemony."

In one speech, the MP said: "These poor Iraqis - ragged people, with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons - are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which has made the country ungovernable.

"We don't know who they are, we don't know their names, we never saw their faces, they don't put up photographs of their martyrs, we don't know the names of their leaders."

(Source)

What a little [rule 8] he is. Of course, like the moustachio'd carpetbagging coward he is he moved his attentions from his old Glasgow constituency to one that has a very large muslim population that is robustly anti-war, so he'll need to be pandering to that.

 

[WildCat]

If this kind of rhetoric gets him re-elected, I fear there's many, many more potential suicide bombers living in London than commonly thought.

 

[JamesM]

Am I alone in finding Galloway's statements hilarious? That "two beautiful daughters" stuff is comedy gold.

 

[WildCat]

Am I alone in finding Galloway's statements hilarious? That "two beautiful daughters" stuff is comedy gold.

Incitement of violence doesn't see too funny to me. Maybe in 50 years it can be laughed at, but not now. The fact that this guy has a constituent base that apparently endorses such views by electing him makes it even less funny.

 

[demon]

What exactly would you have Galloway say instead then?

"your daughters are being raped -so you'd better lie back and accept it"?

Galloway is vainglorious and full of himself -he is a politician. But the "respectable" commentators continually exaggerate and harp on about those failings -common to most well-known politicians - because they far prefer to play the man rather than the ball.

I've always kept one hand on my wallet when in a room with the man (yes, shock horror I`ve met him), but I`d do that in the presence of Blair, Bush and the rest of them, but the sheer vitriol heaped on the man by the establishment far exceeds any actual importance he could ever have (including signal achievements like BG&B). Indeed, the only man I can think of to be on the receiving end of quite so many slings and arrows is Scargill.

What Galloway says is so frequently correct that his enemies are reduced to distortion and smear while the media more generally confine themselves to puerile digs about his taste in clothes and his penchant for cigars. Their treatment of what he says is emblematic of this -endless wittering about form (rhetoric, firebrand, polemic, harrangue, orator, rant etc) and studious avoidance of content.

 

[JamesM]

What exactly would you have Galloway say instead then?

"your daughters are being raped -so you'd better lie back and accept it"?

Conceivably, he could have refrained from using the raped-daughter metaphor entirely.

Their treatment of what he says is emblematic of this -endless wittering about form (rhetoric, firebrand, polemic, harrangue, orator, rant etc) and studious avoidance of content.

He doesn't have to make it so easy. References to Jerusalem and Baghdad as raped daughters in the hands of foreigners does not strike me as an invitation to a sober analysis of middle east politics.

 

[demon]

JamesM:
"He doesn't have to make it so easy. References to Jerusalem and Baghdad as raped daughters in the hands of foreigners does not strike me as an invitation to a sober analysis of middle east politics."

While not being an admirer of Galloway's taste for overblown rhetoric, I think we should observe that referring to the destruction of this city or that, in war, has been known as "the rape of (wherever)" for many centuries and is not at all unusual or offensive.
To suggest that this sort of behaviour should get you removed from the country as Lister and Wildcat suggest is in my opinion a little short of a proper sense of perspective.


On an a historical note, the "invading rapists" meme was fairly common during WW II, especially in the US with regards to the "nips."

American propaganda posters of the time are filled with depictions of buck-toothed, slanty-eyed "japs" who are hell-bent on crossing the ocean in order to defile the sanctity of white American womanhood.

Just take a look at the early Dr Suess depictions of Japanese.

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa291.htm

http://www.tfaoi.com/am/8am/8am203.jpg

 

[JamesM]

While not being an admirer of Galloway's taste for overblown rhetoric, I think we should observe that referring to the destruction of this city or that, in war, has been known as "the rape of (wherever)" for many centuries and is not at all unusual or offensive.

It doesn't seem comparable to me. Perhaps, a reference to the Rape of Baghdad or The Rape of Jerusalem would be one thing, but he's off on a flight of fancy about beautiful daughters. Even then, it would be very difficult to justify a comparison between Baghdad and Jerusalem with the Nanjing Massacre, which is the obvious reference.

On an a hstorical note, the "invading rapists" meme was fairly common during WW II, especially in the US with regards to the "nips."

but was it being used as a metaphor?