April 6, 2009: Was the George Galloway case about free speech?

By Michael Regenstreif

British MP George Galloway was scheduled to speak April 2 in Ottawa at the Bronson Centre as part of a four-stop Canadian speaking tour that was also to have brought him to Toronto, Mississauga and Montreal.

By the time you read this column, you’ll know whether or not Galloway made it to his Canadian dates. Prior to his scheduled visit, the Canadian Border Security Agency had declared him unwelcome in Canada because of his support for Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, citing Galloway’s “financial, material support for an illegal terrorist organization,” said the government would not overturn the agency’s decision to keep Galloway out of the country.

As I write – on March 27 – I can’t say for sure that Galloway didn’t make it to the Bronson Centre. His Canadian tour organizers had a federal court hearing scheduled for March 29 in Toronto and were hoping the court would overturn the ruling barring Galloway from entering Canada. If unsuccessful in court, they vowed to hold the events anyway with Galloway speaking via a closed-circuit Internet connection.

After the war with Hamas in Gaza, Galloway led a 5,000-mile overland convoy that delivered well over $1.4 million U.S. worth of material goods to Hamas. Not to a UN relief agency, but directly to Hamas. That, apparently, is what got him barred from Canada.

In Gaza, Galloway gave an interview to IslamOnline in which he heaped praise on Hamas and its “prime minister,” Ismail Haniya. He came to Gaza, he said, to “stand beside” Haniya. “I have offered him corporeal and financial support.”

Galloway went on to say that Hamas does “nothing illegal here in Gaza,” adding “Haniya is the PM of all the free people, not only in Gaza, but also all over the world. We accept him as a PM for the free people.”

That was hardly the first time Galloway had shown his support for terrorists. Google him and you’ll find lots of examples. On July 22, 2006, during Israel’s war with Hezbollah, Galloway told a crowd at a pro-Hezbollah demonstration that “Hezbollah has never been a terrorist organisation” and declared “I am here to glorify the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah. I am here to glorify the leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.”

In a 1994 speech in Baghdad, Galloway famously told Saddam Hussein, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability,” although he later claimed to be saluting the Iraqi people rather than the dictator.

Galloway has been a member of the British House of Commons since 1987. He was originally a member of the Labour Party, but was expelled from the party in 2003. He is now the only MP for Respect, a far-left fringe party.

After the last election, Galloway told Al-Jazeera, “I was re-elected despite all the efforts made by the British government, the Zionist movement and the newspapers and news media which are controlled by Zionism.”

The Ottawa Peace Alliance was one of the main sponsors of Galloway’s Canadian speaking tour. It’s hard to see how peace fits into George Galloway’s agenda.

The Ottawa Peace Alliance and the other Galloway sponsors have framed the issue of his being barred from Canada as a free speech issue and have set up a website called defendfreespeech.ca. In reading through the website – at least as of March 27 – there is nothing there about free speech as a principle that applies to all people and all points of view. Only as something that George Galloway deserves.

I find it interesting that they’re painting the Galloway case as a free speech issue because one of the other main sponsors of Galloway’s Canadian tour is Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), a group that first gained national attention in 2002 by promising to shut down the speech that Benjamin Netanyahu – then a former prime minister of Israel – was scheduled to give on September 9 that year at Concordia University in Montreal.

True to their promise, SPHR led a violent riot that day at Concordia that forced the cancellation of Netanyahu’s speech and, for years afterwards, SPHR trumpeted gleefully about how they prevented Netanyahu from speaking. It’s hard to see how free speech fits into the SPHR agenda.

And, in a bit of irony, SPHR was to have presented Galloway’s Montreal speech in Room 110 of Concordia University’s Hall Building, the very room their violent riot prevented Netanyahu from speaking in on September 9, 2002.

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The late Terry Schwarzfeld was a good friend of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. She contributed articles on occasion and I had the great pleasure of sitting down for an interview with her just before she left for Calgary in November to be installed as national president of Canadian Hadassah-WIZO. Our deepest condolences go to the Cotsman and Schwarzfeld families.