GEORGE GALLOWAY argues why the choice facing Londoners couldn’t be clearer.
Morning Star, 19 April 2008
Any doubts about the topography of the battlefield in the race for London Mayor ought to have been dispelled this week with the shrill escalation of the Evening Standard’s attacks on Ken Livingstone.
Hundreds of billboards across the capital repeated the front page headline, “Suicide bomb backer runs Ken’s campaign.” It was a masterful piece of propaganda straight out of the playbook of the 1930s fascist propagandists whom Associated Newspapers were so attached to at the time.
The story actually amounted to little more than the fact that the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), an organisation that has co-hosted the major anti-war demonstrations, is working with others to ensure a large turnout of Muslim voters in the capital and is strongly advocating a vote for Livingstone for mayor.
The BMI is also calling for a vote for myself for the assembly and for Respect’s candidate in the City and East London constituency, Hanif Abdulmuhit.
Now you might have thought that Muslim activists arguing for democratic political engagement and taking part in lobbying, meetings, leafleting and all other activities that attend elections in Britain would receive plaudits from the self-styled defenders of the mother of parliaments. But no – the worthy aim of getting hundreds of thousands of Muslim voters to turn out at the polls is apparently evidence of a sinister, anti-democratic plot.
“When confronted about his infamous choice of language to describe black people – ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ – Boris Johnson’s responses ranged from claims of being misinterpreted to apologies for the offence caused. And when, a few days ago, Nick Ferrari questioned him on his no less distasteful statements on Islam, the Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty denied ever making them. He insisted that Ken Livingstone, the mayoral incumbent and his fellow guest on the breakfast show, was seeking to smear him. Islam, he emphatically declared, was ‘a religion of peace’.
“Osama Saeed, who has openly called for ‘a caliphate’, a pan-Islamic global state, has a serious chance of being elected for Glasgow Central when the failing Brown government finally calls a general election. Salmond doesn’t seem to care about the harm being done to the Muslim community by elevating someone such as Saeed, who last week was appointed to be a member of the Scottish government’s working group to look at the issue of Trident replacement.”