Off topic, but not worth a new thread: could someone help a Yank out? I was watching an old Galloway news clip from the time of leaving the Big Brother show--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7RW72jiXeg
Is the blonde-haired reporter in red at the right of the screen the same presenter that is currently at your Channel 4 News? They look similar but I can't be sure. I saw the encounter between George and Channel 4 after the Bradford elections, and if this silly, very hostile reporter in red is the same person, it puts that encounter in a new light for me.
Good Night with George Galloway - On Julian Assange
So, this video has caused a fair amount of fuss... I only saw that there was a kickup about it after I'd spent the afternoon arguing with so-called anti-fascists about why they were blindly calling Assange a rapist. I pointed out that you shouldn't do that until a person has been found guilty, specifically not in a case like this.
But they were having none of it and they accused me of being a rape-apologist because I wasn't joining in with them. I used the phrase "witch hunt" to describe their approach, but none of them realised the direct comparison between them condemning someone without trial (or even a charge being laid) and people in the middle-ages doing the same to those women who were burned as witches.
(It was nice to hear a wee mention at about 10 minutes into the video.)
"Let me be clear, as a politician and as a woman. Rape occurs when a woman has not consented to sex. George Galloway’s comments on what constitutes rape are deeply disappointing and wrong. "
"Unfortunately, this EMI-Music-Content is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights".
So I'll just have to use me VPN then. What a load of bollox.
edit,
He's right, except for his rape definition, there I'm with Salma Yaqoob. Shame really, that has taken the light away from what he said about the Assange stitch-up.
In Defence of George Galloway
John Wight
huffingtonpost.co.uk/john-wight/george-galloway-a-defence_b_1820893.html
23/08/2012
The concerted attempt to demonize George Galloway over his comments on the rape allegations levelled at Julian Assange is reflective of something rotten in British cultural life. Nothing short of a lynching-by-media is being attempted by a range of commentators from right to left, to the point where there's no room left on the bandwagon.
George Galloway is not nor has he ever been an apologist for rape. He is not nor has he ever been a 'rape-denier'. He is however a firm opponent of what he and many others around the world consider bears all the hallmarks of the political and legal witchhunt of a man whose role with Wikileaks rocked and humiliated a US government that is now determined to take its revenge. Anyone who still doubts this need only consider the treatment meted out to Bradley Manning, accused of passing classified information to Wikileaks and is now facing 52 years in prison and who since his arrest in 2010 has had his human rights repeatedly violated.
The truth is that rape has become such a politically loaded issue in this country it is impossible to have an honest discussion about it without feeling like you're walking through a minefield of hysteria and semantic traps, designed to trip you up if you dare deviate from the path of an unwritten but no less rigid consensus, which is that any man accused of rape under any circumstances is guilty until proven innocent - with anyone who suggests it should be the other way round no better than a rapist him or herself. This occludes rather than enlightens the issue and is designed to place a curtain of censorship around it.
The allegations faced by Assange, which he denies and of which by law he remains innocent until proven guilty, are extremely serious. Any man accused of rape is disgraced by the very allegation. To be publicly accused of the offence, as Assange has been, leaves a stigma that no legal defence can hope to eradicate. Regardless of guilt or innocence, in this respect the allegations have already had a devastating effect on his reputation in the eyes of many who've commentated on the story since it broke, moving him from the status of someone being persecuted for political reasons to a rapist doing his utmost to avoid justice. If he is guilty of course he must face the consequences. But only a fool or a supporter of his extradition to the US would deny that he has a justified concern over going to Sweden to be questioned under the present circumstances. After all, does anyone really think that the Ecuadorian Government did not look into the case before granting Julian Assange asylum? Does anyone really believe that tiny Ecuador would defy the might of the United States and its junior partner Britain just for the hell of it?
The precise cause of the calumniation that has been attached to Galloway's intervention is the assertion that in his podcast he downplays rape by suggesting that if Assange initiated sex with one of the women involved while she was sleeping, on the morning after they'd already had consensual sex as is claimed, then it might be considered 'bad sexual etiquette' but it would not be rape as most people understand it.
How many men or women have initiated sex with a partner or sexual partner in the morning under those very circumstances? I would guess 99 percent, including most of those who are currently clambering for Galloway's head.
If any degree of coercion is involved of course it is rape, no doubt. If the other person involved withdraws their consent at any time then the man or woman who initiated sex must stop. On this there can be no equivocation. But Galloway did not dispute either of those red lines. His focus was on the fact that the woman involved in this particular instance went on to hold a party for Assange the night after the alleged rape took place, then the day after went out to dinner with him. Surely any reasonable person, with this mind, would allow for even a smidgeon of something suspicious over the way these allegations have come about? That George Galloway did so without in the eyes of his accusers giving sufficient room to the possibility that the allegations may be true, reflects not a dismissive attitude to rape, as is being inferred, but his understanding of the nature of the beast that Assange has provoked via Wikileaks and his own consistent opposition to that beast, which is otherwise known as Empire.
But this isn't really about Julian Assange. The focus that has been placed on George Galloway is a political campaign being conducted by on the one hand his many enemies within the liberal media who smell blood, and on the other those on the left who are determined to police the issue of rape, the context in which it can be discussed, to the point where men in general are expected to view their sexuality and natural sexual instinct as predatory, something to be ashamed of, something dirty and devious which marks them out as potential rapists.
As a man and as a rational human being I completely and utterly reject this. Rape is far too serious an issue to trivialise and reduce to the level of a stick to beat men with just by dint of them being men. By the same token false allegations of rape are equally too serious to be treated lightly.
George Galloway's only crime is that he spoke the truth without fear or favour as he and many others see it, and 'In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act'.
Anybody else think its time to boot Salma out of the party? If she joins the anti-Galloway lynch mob as soon as the media hysteria begins then she's not the right person for the job.
Here's another decent column, if you can get past the typical hack journalist mentions of cats and stuff:
On rape, George Galloway has a point Ignore feminists’ shrill attempts to demonise critics – we need an honest debate about the meaning of rape.
Luke Samuel
http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/12799/
First and foremost, I would like to make clear that this is not an article about that delusional weirdo currently squatting in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Who wouldn’t be bored and annoyed by the ongoing nonsense that this annoying prat has given rise to? It really is hard to bear. Rather, it is an article about the remarks made by the slightly – and it really is a close call – less annoying George Galloway, who has caused a stir by referring to what is alleged against Assange as ‘poor sexual etiquette’, rather than what it is known as under English law: rape.
Galloway, the Respect Party MP for Bradford West, who is more famous for acting like a cat on television than his views on sexual politics, set tongues wagging when he described the allegations made by two Swedish interns against Julian Assange in terms not fitting with our contemporary hysterical attitude to rape. He said that having sex with someone while they were asleep and without a condom, which is part of what is alleged against Assange, ‘did not constitute rape’. Arguing that it does, he continued, bankrupted the term rape ‘of all its meaning’.
Ever since Galloway made the remarks in the course of a truly weird video podcast on Monday, he has been accused of rape denial, condemned by the leader of his own party, and heavily criticised by rape-awareness charities. He follows in a line – albeit a short one – of prominent middle-aged men who have come under fire for discussing rape. Last year, the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, came under fire for claiming that some rapes were more serious than others. This prompted some to argue that middle-aged men ‘must not pontificate about rape’ – even talking about the ‘r’ word should be off limits to such people.
The hysterical reaction to what Galloway said is telling. It’s telling because he has a point. Since the 1970s, society has experienced a significant expansion of our understanding of what constitutes rape. This has, in some ways, been a positive and important development. In 1992, the House of Lords ruled that sex between a husband and wife was capable of being ‘unlawful’ sex for the purposes of the Sexual Offences Act, meaning that a husband could be deemed to have raped his wife. The inclusion of anal penetration in the wording of the offence by section 142 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 meant that gay rape could be punished. These are positive developments.
But there have been significant negative effects, too. There has been an enormous increase in the number of rape complaints being made over the past 20 years, with no concurrent rise in convictions. This means that many complaints are being made which are without merit and, consequently, many more innocent people are being accused of a very serious crime without evidence. In 2010, two 10-year-old boys became the youngest people ever to be convicted of rape following what many described as a ‘game that went too far’. In a society where the label ‘rape’ can be applied to anything from children playing doctors and nurses, to a man having sex with his lover while she sleeps, to a man pulling a woman from the street and into a bush and forcing her to have sex, Galloway poses a question that many rape campaigners simply do not want to answer: what does ‘rape’ mean today and why is it such a serious crime?
We have become far more aware of rape over the past 40 years. The 1970s saw the establishment of rape crisis centres across the UK and America to facilitate women talking about experiences of sexual aggression. In the 1980s, many scientific studies purported to demonstrate that rape was endemic. One such survey across 32 American campuses concluded that one in four women had been the victim of rape or attempted rape. Another study at St Cloud State University concluded that 29 per cent of women surveyed reported being physically or psychologically forced to have sexual intercourse.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) in the United States even compiled ‘victimisation surveys’ in which representatives of the DoJ would interview a random sample of women in their homes to see if they had been the victim of rape. In accordance with their university counterparts, the American government found rape to be endemic: in 1983 these surveys reported that one in every 600 woman had been raped.
Feminist writers used this newly discovered prevalence of rape to rebrand it from a crime of violence into a crime of ‘power’. According to some, the emergence of endemic rape showed that rape was an extension of the patriarchal power exercised by men throughout society. Writing in 1988, Robin Warshaw summed up the feeling of many feminists at the time: ‘Men are socialised to be sexually aggressive… women are socialised to submit to men’s wills’. Not only was rape now everywhere, but it was caused and propagated by the patriarchy in wider society.
But the drive to expand society’s understanding of rape was dependent on a legalistic understanding of what constituted rape. It required women to view themselves as victims of rape in virtue of the fact that they had experienced penetration by a penis without consenting, and nothing more. This was, in part, an understandable reaction against the prejudices about rape complainants.
But as women were encouraged more and more to measure their sexual encounters against the legal definition of rape, the space for judgement and common sense began to diminish. If women who had been penetrated without consent refused to acknowledge themselves as rape victims they were ‘in denial’. If men questioned whether every instance of non-consensual penetration was rape, they became rape ‘apologists’. Consequently, the drive to bring rape into popular consciousness had a significant side effect: it encouraged us to define our sexual encounters strictly in reference to the law rather than our own judgement.
In fact, this legalistic approach to what constitutes rape has significantly negative effects for our discussion of what ‘rape’ means. Perhaps, most obviously, it encourages the idea that rape is a simple crime, one which is wholly divorceable from any human context. In the language of many rape-awareness campaigners, ‘rape is rape’. George Galloway is wrong to say that this conception robs rape of all meaning – after all, there is no coherent idea of what ‘rape’ means today. But it certainly does rob the term of its social seriousness. While some rape campaigners – and perhaps some pedantic lawyers as well – may seriously argue that a man and a woman in a loving relationship falling into sex while asleep is akin to all other kinds of rape, everyone else in the real world recognises this is nonsense.
But perhaps more importantly, a purely legalistic conception of what rape means is simply a way of shutting down discussion. It is an abdication of our responsibility to define for ourselves what constitutes legitimate sexual behaviour. For as long as we continue placidly to insist that all non-consensual penetration with a penis is rape, we avoid the more difficult question of what kinds of behaviour are and are not worthy of punishment. Human society, and the complex and often ambiguous relationships that constitute it, can never be properly reduced to a handful of words on the statute book. We do victims of rape a disservice by pretending that it can.
So Galloway was right when he said that we need a serious discussion on what ‘rape’ means. While Assange’s lawyers, his supporters and his detractors have spent the week pointlessly arguing about whether the allegations constitute rape under English law, the rest of us should move the discussion on. The allegations against Assange do amount to rape under English law. The more difficult question, one to which neither the Sexual Offences Act nor the Supreme Court can supply the answer, is whether they should.
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