1-Feb-13: Quote of the week: A moment of moral clarity in the UK parliament

Galloway in Gaza, with arch terrorist Ismail Haniyeh, 2010 [Image Source]

Scene from the British parliament at Westminister on Wednesday [YouTube captured it here, and Algemeiner wrote it up here].

George Galloway was expelled from the Labor Party in 2003 for bringing it into disrepute. He notoriously honored the despot Saddam Hussein in a 1994 speech that ended with this formulation: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability".

On Wednesday in Parliament, as the member for Bradford West for the bizarrely-named Respect Party, he put a question/comment to the prime minister, requiring that the latter adumbrate the differences between one brand of "hand-chopping, throat-cutting" terrorist of the kind to be found in Mali and some other sort of jihadist. (For the record, Galloway is no stranger to speaking publicly about terrorists; he has no difficulty praising them lavishly.)

With barely a moment's hesitation, UK prime minister David Cameron rose to his feet with this first-class put-down:

“Some things come and go, but there is one thing that is certain: Wherever there is a brutal Arab dictator in the world, he’ll have the support of the honorable gentleman.”

To illustrate the point in a very small way, recall that the "honorable gentleman" was said (by the Times of London in August 2012) to "earn almost £80,000 a year from a new Lebanese TV station accused of having links to Syria and Iran... [Galloway] recently began presenting a show on al-Mayadeen. The Arabic-language station, launched in June, presents itself as a counterweight to channels such as the Qatari-funded al-Jazeera, which it sees as biased against Syria and its allies."