Harry’s Place reader Cam Hardy reports on the Galloway performance in Toronto Friday evening:
The Galloway lecture was what I expected. A friend of mine who accompanied me in leafleting has written a detailed account of the night on his blog, although I should add he mistakenly attributed the leaflets to my brother Ryan.
The only thing I can really add to his account is how disheartening it was for me to see senior members of the NDP and the trade union movement attending Mr. Galloway’s lecture. In the crowd was Howard Hampton (leader of the Ontario NDP), Joe Comartin (an MP from Windsor, Ontario), and Olivia Chow (a Toronto city councillor and wife of Jack Layton, leader of the federal NDP).
Aside from my friends and I, who rarely clapped and occasionally jeered, Galloway only lost the crowd at one point, when he criticized the NDP’s stand against Sharia law in Ontario. He told the audience that this was catering to the right-wing and risked dividing the anti-war movement. He also offered his expert interpretation of Karl Marx at one point, which was amusing, to say the least.
Overall we handed out about 200 leaflets, and were met with relatively limited abuse. Some people were actually quite civil in their disagreement, which was a nice surprise.
Update: Here’s the official GGTB take on the Toronto show.
And here’s Hitchens on the matchup in New York. Does he have evidence we don’t about what Galloway discussed with Tariq Aziz? You be the judge.