Galloway to appear in NZ?

[faceless]

'George Galloway has accepted RAM's invitation to speak at our Voices of Peace meetings. This is the British Respect MP who visited America several years ago to put US president George Bush "on trial" for war crimes in front of the US Congress. George Galloway is one of the world's most powerful speakers for social justice and against the US war in Iraq and its terrible consequences, like the global spread of Islamophobia. He will attract huge media interest here in New Zealand and probably overseas too.'

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That's quite a long flight without a cigar!

[faceless]

NZ set to be islamic debate battleground
By REG PONNIAH - NZPA
Thursday, 19 July 2007
www.stuff.co.nz

New Zealand is set to be a verbal battleground for pro- and anti-islamic groups when outspoken advocates of each visit this month. Left-wing maverick British MP George Galloway is to visit on July 27-28, about the same time as Australian right-wing Baptist pastor Stuart Robinson.

Pro-islamic Mr Galloway was expelled from the British Labour Party for opposing the United States-led war in Iraq.
The organisers of his visit to New Zealand – Residents Against Movement (RAM) – said it would help the organisation in its campaign against Islamophobes. RAM spokesman Grant Morgan told NZPA yesterday Mr Galloway was an internationally recognised figure and his presence in New Zealand was welcomed.

In contrast, Mr Morgan said Mr Robinson would promote disunity among Christians and Muslims. Mr Robinson's book Mosques and Miracles called for the "mother of all spiritual wars" to be fought against "evil" Islam, Mr Morgan said. "The people who are coming from Australia are hard-core professional, extreme right-wing Islamophobes . They are not interested in reasoned, rational arguments."

Mr Galloway was to speak against Islamophobia at two meetings in Auckland. Islamophobia is racism against Muslims. The Galloway meetings were open to the public and media, he said. Mr Robinson would address closed meetings, Mr Morgan said. NZPA calls to the organisers of the Robinson visit were not returned. "If their message was wholesome, why would they try to hide it from scrutiny by the public and the media?" Mr Morgan said.

Mr Galloway would not meet New Zealand MPs or government representatives, Mr Morgan said. Green Party MP Keith Locke told NZPA he would be happy to meet Mr Galloway in New Zealand. "I have already emailed him. I have not got a reply yet but I hope to have a short conversation with him." Mr Locke said he and Mr Galloway had a lot of common ground on various issues. "We are very much impressed with him in his stand on Iraq."

Mr Locke said he understood Mr Galloway represented a constituency that had a sizeable Muslim population and they were very supportive of him during elections. "I'm sure Mr Galloway's message will be one of harmony between religions."

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[faceless]

I'm just thinking - this will be Galloway's first major appearance after today's news, so I hope someone down that way has got good recording equipment.

[faceless]

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0707/S00296.htm

[faceless]

on a cursory look about, it seems that the Kiwis haven't been able to get anything online yet. The lazy buggers!

[Brown Sauce]

me an' my missis met in NZ. Hmmmm. respect? ask a Maori. Me, my mate Will "proud" member of the "Wellington Unemployed Workers Union", and his gay brother ....

edit.. just in case i'm not maori, but Will and his brother Henari are .. punch on the nose ... .

that's on the north island, look south ... oooooer

after traveling for 20 years here there an' everywhere, the total lack of anything like european culture in sub euro rid nick NZ reminded me of how european I am. something that's taken for granted, unless ..

then they have quick buck japanese road signs in "queenstown".

is it Paraparaumu or "pram"?

didn't listen to GG, but I do have a handle on maori "respect".


don't know if it matters much, but after 6 months in NZ, and a couple in OZ, I honestly thought that the NZ accent was akin to south africa, and OZ to the states. really, it's only a small bit, but ...

talking of respect, and aussies, pohms, kiwis, jocks, paddies, frogs, taffs ... isn't it a shame that political politeness has thrown "......"out. aha, which one ?? 60 years of free culture to the winner .. cheap .. perhaps.
clue .. the "n" word is with all respect, not included.

maybe i'll make a thread of this ... and other forms of contentious, humourless, political disrespect ...

"We Are Warriors" by Alan Duff. not a bad read. I was shearing sheep after four fuckin' days in jet lagged NZ, in Te Kuiti, world capital of sheep shearing, cheers Ross and the hells angels of the te kuiti golf club, wellies and slippers at the door .. hard bastards ...

edit three .. Anja and myself watched the film of this book in Rotorua, very shortly, like one or two days after it's release. we were the only white folk in the flix. you could hear a pin drop on the way out, not at all 'cause of us of course.

edit twooooo

"god likes spiritual fruits, not religious nuts"

bfbs chaplin whatsisname yesterday.

[Brown Sauce]

"It's a long way to come for a clean weekend". GG,

[faceless]

Here's the first bit of media that I've managed to find so far - it's a 25 minute interview with Mikey Havoc on www.95bfm.com in two parts.

PART 1
PART 2

[faceless]

[faceless]

By George, he's got a nerve
Sunday Star Times (NZ) | Sunday, 29 July 2007
George Galloway, the left-wing British MP accused of having links with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, is visiting New Zealand to speak against `Islamophobia'. He talks to Anthony Hubbard.

Gorgeous George is high on rage and laughter. He's just been suspended from the British parliament for taking Saddam's money, but the condemned man jeered and joked all the way to the scaffold. Being lectured by the House about the funding of political campaigns, he said, "is like being accused of slouching by the Hunchback of Notre Dame". Galloway is a poet of vituperation, with the galactic vocabulary and the cruel precision of the self-taught (he left school in Scotland at 16). When he met Christopher Hitchens, the left-wing writer who backed George Bush's war on Iraq, the teetotal MP said: "You're a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay. Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink."

Now he's explaining on the phone from London why he's been convicted by a "politicised tribunal". The British parliamentary standards commissioner found, after a four-year investigation, that Galloway's campaign against the sanctions on Iraq had been financed partly by the Iraqi dictatorship. "Mr Galloway at best turned a blind eye to the fact that this was happening," wrote Sir Philip Mawer. Galloway focuses his verbal laser. "In the Nelsonian sense, I did not turn a blind eye because that would mean I knew something and pretended not to - that's the normal usage of that phrase," he tells the Sunday Star-Times. But if it's meant literally, then it's true, as I said from the very first day when this matter arose. I did turn a blind eye literally and a deaf ear, as every political fundraiser in the country, and I suspect in the world, does.

"I don't suppose," he says, laughing, "that you will want to report the words I used in the House, in case they offend the sensibilities of New Zealanders." But when the British porn king and newspaper tycoon Richard Desmond gave a huge donation to Labour, he says, "nobody asked which part of his considerable fortune the donation came from". Actually, what Galloway said in parliament was: "Did the treasurer of the Labour Party ask if Mr Desmond was giving from the profits of Spunk-Loving Sluts, Asian Babes, XXX pornographic television, or the profits of the Daily Star (newspaper)?"

Galloway became world famous as the British "MP for Baghdad North", the politician who fawned on the Iraqi dictator and allegedly received money from his regime. In 1994 he met Saddam and reportedly told him: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." He claimed later that he was addressing the Iraqi people, not their leader. His campaign against Tony Blair and the Iraq war grew increasingly furious and in 2003 he was expelled from the Labour Party. But he founded his own left-wing party called Respect and is now its sole MP.

Galloway is in many ways like a hard-left version of Winston Peters. Both are snappy dressers - hence Galloway's nickname "Gorgeous George" - and both are mavericks who rose again after facing the party firing squad. Both are masters of the debating chamber, mixing rhetorical fire with effortless obfuscation and abuse. Their charm is intolerable. So isn't it true that he sucked up to Saddam? "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. You cannot try to rescue the 23 million people in Iraq from the Calvary on which they were being crucified without dealing with whomever is in power in Baghdad -and that's just a fact. Even Amnesty International, when they ask you to plead with the most brutal dictator (Galloway pronounces it `dictatah') for the relief of a prisoner, ask you to address the brutal dictatah `Your excellency, Mr President'. So that's just a reality of political life."

It was "a good rule of thumb in this complicated world" to deal pragmatically with those in power. "That used to be the ABC of international relations. It's the reason that President Nixon went to Chinah. He said, `You can't go on with this fantasy that Taiwan is Chinah and that a thousand million people in the People's Republic don't exist."'

Sir Philip Mawer found that part of Galloway's Mariam Appeal -based around a young Iraqi cancer sufferer he brought to Britain for medical treatment - was indirectly financed by Saddam's dictatorship. However, he found no evidence that Galloway profited personally from the money. A Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zureikat, had donated more than $1.2m, most of which came from taking part in Saddam's Oil for Food Programme. Galloway flatly denies this, saying Zureikat's donation came from "profits he legally made in his legal trading with Iraq".

The MP scorns parliament's Standards and Privileges Committee, which agreed with the thrust of Mawer's findings and recommended Galloway be suspended from the House for 18 days. "It is po-faced, pompous and preposterous to ask the public to believe that the individual politicians on the committee leave their politics at the door. That flies in the face of everything we know about ourselves," he told the House.

Eventually, his ad hominem attacks on the committee and the commissioner got him thrown out of the House even before the 18-day suspension took effect. Like Winston Peters, Galloway likes to paint himself as the victim of nefarious conspiracies, including media ones. He claimed that he won his East London constituency, for instance, despite the efforts of the "Zionist" press.

His statements about the Middle East have scandalised many. He once said Hizbollah "is not, and has never been, a terrorist organisation. It is the legitimate national resistance movement of Lebanon". Last week he defended this on the extraordinary grounds that "a party that's in the Lebanese cabinet and in the Lebanese parliament cannot realistically be described as terrorists". Yes, he conceded, Hizbollah had carried out attacks that had killed innocent bystanders, "but not as many innocent bystanders as Israel".

The MP campaigns against Islamophobia and "the dangerous world that has been created by these madmen Bush and Blair and how we can get out from this swamp of hatred. Of course, New Zealand's not as responsible for the crimes in the world as Australia is. But I do think the message is nonetheless relevant to people in your fine country."

Galloway was criticised for taking part in the Celebrity Big Brother television programme last year: why was he fooling around on TV instead of serving his electors? He notoriously played a cat during the show, lapping imaginary milk held by the actress Rula Lenska. In another sketch he danced in a red leotard with a transvestite. But he points out that his appearance had earned him a fat fee and "rather more nobly" had raised a large sum for charity, and given his Respect party priceless publicity. The cost, of course, was a certain amount of national humiliation.

Galloway's sense of humour does extend to himself. "When I was in the red leotard," he tells the Star-Times, "I wished the ground had opened up and swallowed me - especially as my (cricket) box didn't look as impressive as I thought it would."

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Hardly a big show of support there - but the laughable fact that journalists such as this one haven't been able to get past him in Big Brother is just getting tedious.

[DavidGig]

Faceless, the hint comes when they put Islamophobia in ironic quotation marks.

[nekokate]

I just spoke to a friend of mine who lives in Wellington, NZ, and she tells me that GG is all over the news there. Unfortunately she is in no position to cap or otherwise provide us with any of it.

She did promise me, however, that she will send me any online links she comes across.

[DavidGig]

The ANZAC biscuits sound good. (Can't make them here in the U.S. because golden syrup can't be found.)

[harry perkins]

"National did support the Coalition of the Willing's right to send troops but that's because we are of the view that every country is entitled to take its own actions"- John Key, NZ leader of the opposition. What an eedjit, supporting the complete negation of a nation's independance on the grounds that other independant (powerfull) nations should be allowed to do it!

[faceless]

Big crowds attend Voices of Peace meetings in Auck
Sunday, 29 July 2007, 2:27 pm
Press Release: RAM

Last night 800 Aucklanders attended the Voices of Peace meeting at the Auckland Girls Grammar Theatre in Auckland. The theatre was packed out, while scores more had to be turned away. The evening before, a maximum crowd of 450 had packed an Auckland University lecture theatre for the first Voices of Peace meeting. These big crowds heard British MP George Galloway link the global rise of Islamophobia with the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli occupation and Palestine and similar imperial crusades to exploit the resources and peoples of the Middle East and elsewhere.

The other speakers were Javed Khan, president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ, Paul Buchanan, an internationally recognised expert on threat assessment, and Grant Morgan, the organiser of RAM - Residents Action Movement. The more than 1,200 people who attended the two Auckland Voices of Peace meetings contrasted sharply with the pathetic 30 who turned out to the Wellington leg of Mosques and Miracles, the race hate touring show fronted by a group of professional Islamophobes from Australia.

"The Aussie Islamophobes had hired the Hope Centre in Lower Hutt which easily holds over 200 people. The 30 registrations they received for the Wellington Mosques and Miracles meeting was a major setback to their aim of building a race hate movement against Muslims in New Zealand," said RAM organiser Grant Morgan. "I have been informed that less than 200 turned up to the Auckland Mosques and Miracles meeting yesterday at the Greenlane Christian Centre. Again, this was way below the calculations of the organisers."

"The tiny numbers turning up to hear the Aussie Islamophobes, compared to the over 1,200 Aucklanders attending the two Auckland Voices of Peace meetings, is a heartening sign that the vast majority of Christians and other people in New Zealand want a society built on the principle of social inclusion, not communal conflict," said Grant Morgan. However, we must not under-estimate the potential threat posed by these Islamophobes who are claiming that every mosque is a 'centre of war' where New Zealand Muslims are plotting to destroy surrounding cities and terrorise, rape and kill non-Muslims. As George Galloway pointed out, when Adolf Hitler started making similar comments about Jews in Germany, he was treated as a 'music hall joke'. We must tackle this threat in New Zealand before the poisonous lies of the Islamophobes infect the body politic."

"Last night, at the Voices of Peace meeting, I pledged that RAM would be campaigning around the theme 'We all belong here' in the September council elections. All good people must unite to defend our Muslim sisters and brothers from the race hate lies of the Aussie Islamophobes and their New Zealand cronies," said Grant Morgan.

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That's good to hear that the manic Christian group was treated with the disdain it deserves.