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What Is George Galloway Playing At?

Category: EDL News Published on Monday, 03 September 2012 21:19 Written by Pyrus Hits: 3564

Allah's Apostle (Pbuh) said, "If a husband calls his wife to his bed (i.e. to have sexual relations) and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning." (Sahih Al-Bukhari Vol. 4 Hadith No. 460 & Sahih Muslim Vol. 2 Hadith No. 3368) 

George Galloway is someone I think we all wish would just disappear.

Sadly, that wish doesn't look likely to be granted any time soon.

Most recently he's been sticking his nose into the controversy surrounding the allegations facing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

According to George, having sex with a woman while she's asleep isn't rape.

Or, as he puts it, “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion."

Now some people, including criminologists, psychologists and other kinds of sensible people, do have some controversial things to say about the subject. They realise that rapists are deservedly demonised in our society, but they also know that in order to prevent future sexual offences we must understand something of the motives and situations that lead to them.

Whilst this can lead experts and informed commentators to challenge established definitions of what rape actually means, these kinds of arguments must always be accompanied by a very clear message that whatever the particular point being made, the seriousness of sexual offences should never be in doubt.

For victims to hear their ordeals being described as ‘not really rape’ is not only extremely distressing, but  runs the very real risk of discouraging victims from coming forward and even making such crimes more likely in the first place.

That is why those in the public eye who make any comments about rape should always have the sense to realise that controversial arguments must always be made sensitively and at the right time.

Galloway’s outburst was neither sensitively put nor sensitively timed. So why say it?

Who could it possibly appease, apart from the conspiracy theorists who believe that the allegations facing Julian Assange are mere fabrications that form part of a devious plot to extradite him to the USA? Even for that brigade,  Galloway’s remarks seem pretty extreme.

Most of us, it’s probably safe to say, regard consent as the important question in determining whether or not someone has committed a sexual offence. There may be legitimate questions to be asked about how exactly consent should be defined, but even if we did sympathise with George Galloway’s point, surely this was a major slip up for such a seasoned political campaigner?

Or was it?

Perhaps it’s not Julian Assange’s most fervent fans that he’s trying to appeal to. But if not them, then who?

To answer that question, let’s remind ourselves who George Galloway is. This is a man who supports and funds the terrorist organisation Hamas; an organisation that has killed scores of innocent people in rocket attacks and suicide bombings, run orchestrated campaigns of torture against its own people, and which makes no secret of its desire to exterminate the world's Jewish population – an ideal it activity promotes to young children.

As the Hamas Charter says, “jihad is our path and death for the sake of Allah our highest hope” (paraphrased from the Arabic).

Here’s a quick compilation showing Galloway’s links to Hamas, including the video proof of him handing over money and equipment.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that a man who supports an antisemitic death-cult would also have some strange ideas about what constitutes rape, but neither does it appear to make sense that such a man could be an elected politician.

Whilst the international community’s paralysis in the face of Israeli-Arab Separatist terrorists like Hamas might go some way to explaining why Galloway isn’t sitting in a prison cell, it still doesn’t explain why anyone would actually vote for such a man. Do they simply not know what he stands for?

“All praise to Allah!” he cried after being elected in Bradford, the town with the largest Muslim population in the UK outside of London. His election campaign made no secret of his ‘pro-Muslim’ stance and led to much speculation about whether or not he was himself a practicing Muslim. So there can be little doubt that Galloway owes his victory to Bradford’s Muslims (who make up around 25% of the population). But did they know they were voting for an extremist?

As Abhijit Pandya says in the Daily Mail, “Galloway represents better than any other politician the modern unholy alliance of the far left and Islamofascism.” Perhaps the people of Bradford don’t read the Daily Mail, or perhaps Bradford has an underlying problem with Islamic extremism (as if…!) and this goes some way to explaining why it elected an extremist candidate.

Whatever the reason, Galloway does not just represent the far left’s embrace of Islamofascism, but also the creeping influence and popularity of extremist Islamic beliefs. But still, what does his support for extremist Islam (and Bradford’s for that matter) have to do with sexual offences?

It’s important to state that the answer is not clear cut, but it is undeniably the case that there is some level of conflict between ‘Western’ ideas about sexual practice (and what constitutes sexual crime) and traditional Islamic ideas. The extent of this conflict is no doubt exaggerated by some Islamic extremists, but if Galloway were to side with particularly hardline Muslims on the definition of rape, then what sort of thing would he be saying?

To find out we did what Muslims are encouraged to do – we looked to Islamic law (Sharia). Sharia law courts allow Muslims to receive religiously-inspired judgements from Sharia jurists, outside of UK law. Whilst some of their supporters claim they are a useful tool for mediating disputes, they can also provoke conflicts between UK law and religious judgements.

The first website we came across was Islamic-Sharia.org, “an authoritative body, consisting of a panel of scholars, representing many established institutions in the UK”. Its advice on the topic of rape is as follows:

“…in instances of fornication, adultery and rape, Islam makes it very hard to prove such allegations, one of the main reasons being that, according to Sharia, a woman's testimony is worth less than a man's."

A woman’s word is worth less than a man’s? Why!?

The council explain: "The text (Surah Al-Baqara 2:282) which requires two female witnesses in place of one male witness, gives a clear reason for it i.e. 'if one of them forgets, the other reminds her.' Is this derogatory to the status of the women or is it a revealed secret about the nature of the women?"

So, Sharia law states that because women are so forgetful (which isn’t a derogatory thing to say, but ‘a revealed secret about the nature of the women’) there must always be two female witnesses to equal the testimony of a man (who, it appears, are always far more reliable).

Wouldn’t this make proving allegations of rape all but impossible? For some reason that doesn’t seem to bother the people at Islamic-Sharia.org.

No mention is made of consent, but then what would consent matter if your testimony would only ever count for half of that of your attacker? Anyway, “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion”, as George so delicately puts it.

In each case – George Galloway and the Sharia experts – we see the same disregard for women’s rights; an unpleasant similarity that perhaps might not be so significant if it weren’t for the other numerous instances in which women’s rights are threatened in the Islamic world.

George Galloway has made it abundantly clear where he stands – he stands with hardline Islamic principles, against UK law and against women’s rights.

But what’s most alarming about this sorry affair isn’t what George Galloway says or what he stands for. It’s that he knows his voters are listening and that this sorry affair will have done little to damage his popularity.