The Obscenity of George Galloway's By-Election Victory

From Melanie Phillips, "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.

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.

And from Norman Tebbit, at Telegraph UK, "Why the major parties can't just blame George Galloway for their shocking performances in Bradford." And from Dan Hodges, "George Galloway has exposed the void at Labour's core and left it fighting for its life."

BONUS: At Blazing Cat Fur, "Galloway and Livingstone: twins in so many ways."