NOTE: I read this today and wanted to bring it to people here for an opinion, as pointed out quite clearly by the wonderful Melanie Phillips, who always tells it as it is - gewwww on gal!!!!

ORIGINAL DOCUMENT can be found HERE

By
Melanie Phillips in The Daily Mail


PUBLISHED:21:50, 1 April 2012

UPDATED:08:28, 2 April 2012

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

A dangerous enemy of democracy who's being encouraged cynically by the Left

The general response to George Galloway’s sensational victory in the Bradford West by-election has missed the point by a mile.

Comment has concentrated on the undoubtedly stunning defeat for Labour, and has
ascribed Galloway’s victory to widespread disaffection with mainstream political parties.
This is certainly part of the story — strikingly, a significant section of the Tory vote appears to have gone to Galloway — but it is not the key factor behind this torrid triumph of a discredited demagogue.

For this rested principally on something that commentators are too blinkered or politically correct to mention. Galloway won because young Bradford Muslims turned out for him in droves.

They did not vote for him because he was promising them better public services. They did not vote for him, indeed, on account of any British domestic issues. They did so because he tailored his message to appeal to their religious passions and prejudices about conflicts abroad.
Specifically, he campaigned against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and for the Palestinians, declaring that his victory would help satisfy voters’ ‘duty’ to care about such grievances.

Pandering

Most commentators have dismissed this victory as a shocking one-off with no further significance than an upset by an entertaining maverick. Not so. For with Galloway’s election, religious extremism has become for the first time a potential game-changer in British politics.
The point being so resolutely ignored is that Galloway ran on an Islamist
religious ticket. It wasn’t simply that he was pandering to Islamist foreign policy obsessions. He made explicit references to Islam throughout his campaign.
‘All praise to Allah!’ he saluted his victory through a loud-hailer — having previously told a public meeting that if people didn’t vote for him, Allah would want to know why.

Indeed, declaring in one address that ‘God knows who is a Muslim’, he implied that he was even more of a true adherent of that faith than Labour’s Muslim candidate who, he suggested without a shred of evidence, drank alcohol whereas he himself had never touched the stuff.
Pinch yourself — a British politician using the inflammatory rhetoric and professions of Islamic piety more commonly heard in Iran or Saudi Arabia.
Just as such religious hucksterism inflames millions of followers in the Islamic world, so certain unscrupulous British politicians have now realised they too can tap into the same well of irrational hatred to deliver them electoral victory.

For sure, countless numbers of Muslims will be as horrified as anyone by this playing to the Islamist gallery. While radicalisation among young Muslims has reached terrifying levels, the vast majority of older British Muslims want nothing whatever to do with ideas which threaten their own liberties along with those of everyone else.

And those loyal Muslims who serve in the UK’s Armed Forces will doubtless be particularly horrified by such cynical support for Iran or the Taliban.
Yet with so many now so profoundly turned off mainstream politics, there is a real risk that millions of disaffected voters will sit on their hands at future elections — thus giving radicalised Muslims the opportunity to begin reshaping the political map of Britain.
This is precisely what Ken Livingstone is also disgracefully exploiting in the London Mayoral election.

There has long been concern that Livingstone has aligned himself with the radical Muslim Brotherhood, whose goal is to conquer the free world for Islam, and has also pandered to Iran by working as a presenter for the Press TV channel owned by the Iranian regime.
In a speech last month at the radical Finsbury Park mosque in London, Livingstone more than amply confirmed such fears. For he pledged to ‘educate the mass of Londoners’ in Islam, saying this would help to cement London as a ’beacon’ for the faith.
Since when was making London a ‘beacon’ for a foreign religion a legitimate goal for any British politician, let alone a priority for a British city mayor?

Bigotry

This was simply no less than the Muslim Brotherhood’s own seditious goal.
And this is a man who as Mayor of London would have control of the
Metropolitan Police?
In another recent incident, he appeared to be using anti-Jewish remarks to play to Islamist, anti-Jewish prejudice.

Jewish

Labour Party supporters who met him for a private discussion reported that he had said he did not expect Jews to vote for a Labour candidate because they were rich.
In an article trying to repair the damage from this reported piece of bigotry, Livingstone has now issued a weaselly denial that he used these words — but conceded that they could have been interpreted in this way.

Such excruciating manoeuvring is less than reassuring in the light of his previous record of anti-Jewish remarks, including his infamous comparison of a Jewish journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard or telling a Jewish property developer to ‘go back to Iran’.
What is so outrageous, however, is the free pass given by the Left to both Galloway and Livingstone. Both support agendas which anyone of conscience, let alone of ‘progressive’ views, should totally abhor. Livingstone has literally embraced Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Islamic religious leader who justifies the suicide bombing of Israeli children, the execution of homosexuals, female genital mutilation and the killing of coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

end

Dangerous