“Misguided, untruthful attacks on Iranian gay people, the queer rights movement and the pink community do not strengthen the antiwar movement and the struggle against US imperialism. On the contrary, they play straight into the hands of the tyrants in Tehran and their mirror opposites in Washington. They betray all Iranians who are yearning and striving for democracy, human rights, social justice and the self-rule of Iran’s oppressed minority nations.”
So argues Peter Tatchell over at CiF in response to the odious Iranian TV presenter, George Galloway.
As I’ve remarked before, Galloway’s corner of “The Left” is an asylum seeker’s worst nightmare. They claim to support asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants, but when the chips are down, they’d rather shill for the regimes the refugee is seeking asylum from on the preposterous grounds that condemning the human rights records of these countries is “colonialist” and “imperialist” or “Eurocentric” and indeed, “playing into the hands of the Neocons”.
It is important to keep exposing this lack of joined-up thinking.
I think Peter is too generous when he sums this situation up:
“To some people, Galloway’s claims look like propaganda in defence of the totalitarian, homophobic Islamic Republic of Iran. His passionate opposition to a war against Iran, which I share, seems to have clouded his judgement; leading him to downplay the regime’s persecution of lesbians and gays, which includes state-sanctioned executions.”
“Clouded judgement”? Come on Peter, you are too kind! This is a man who cuddled up to Saddam Hussein, and who talks of “China’s supposed ‘occupation’ of Tibet” on the grounds that Tibet was “rescued from the mists of obscurantism under the demi- God Dalai Lama by the Chinese revolution.” And of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to Galloway, was “the biggest catastrophe of my life”.
This is not, in my view, a man whose “passionate opposition” to war has “clouded his judgement”. This is a man who has made a career out of apologising for dictators.
