What Iraqi’s think I thought the statistics in this article were interesting when you compare what the MOD spokesman has to say about 'democracy'...
82%of Iraqi's are opposed to our presence there
and yet this, according to the MOD, is democracy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4369350.stm
Two beautiful statues in a park, facing … Two beautiful statues in a park, facing each other across the grass, one of a young girl and the other of a young man, looking towards each other like young lovers. These statues gave so much pleasure to people visiting the park that God looked down and decided to reward them with life for 30 minutes, on a Sunday when the park was closed to the public.
Immediately when they came alive, they ran together into the bushes and could be heard giggling and cooing with pleasure and the bushes were shaking. After 15 minutes they came out and realised that they still had 15 minutes more life to live.
"What shall we do now then" said the boy statue. "Let's do the same thing again" she replied. "Okay", said the boy statue, "but this time, you hold the pidgeons down while I shit on them".
|[url=http://www.****.info]****.info[/url]|[url=http://www.****.info]****.info[/url]|hbit.info|[url=http://www.****.info]****.info[/url]
quality journalism New Statesman (UK)
17 October 2005
When journalists report propaganda instead of the truth, the consequences can be catastrophic -- as one largely-forgotten instance demonstrates.
We Need to be Told
by John Pilger
Thursday, October 13, 2005 -- (ICH) -- ''The propagandist's purpose," wrote Aldous Huxley, "is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." The British, who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were specialists in the field. At the height of the slaughter known as the First World War, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."
What has changed?
"If we had all known then what we know now," said the New York Times on 24 August, "the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry." The admission was saying, in effect, that powerful newspapers, like powerful broadcasting organizations, had betrayed their readers and viewers and listeners by not finding out -- by amplifying the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them. The direct consequences were a criminal invasion called "Shock and Awe" and the dehumanizing of a whole nation.
This remains largely an unspoken shame in Britain, especially at the BBC, which continues to boast about its rigor and objectivity while echoing a corrupt and lying government, as it did before the invasion. For evidence of this, there are two academic studies available -- though the capitulation of broadcast journalism ought to be obvious to any discerning viewer, night after night, as "embedded" reporting justifies murderous attacks on Iraqi towns and villages as "rooting out insurgents" and swallows British army propaganda designed to distract from its disaster, while preparing us for attacks on Iran and Syria. Like the New York Times and most of the American media, had the BBC done its job, many thousands of innocent people almost certainly would be alive today.
When will important journalists cease to be establishment managers, and analyze and confront the critical part they play in the violence of rapacious governments?
An anniversary provides an opportunity. Forty years ago this month, Major General Suharto began a seizure of power in Indonesia by unleashing a wave of killings that the CIA described as "the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century". Much of this episode was never reported, and remains secret. None of the reports of recent terror attacks against tourists in Bali mentioned the fact that near the major hotels were the mass graves of some of an estimated 80,000 people killed by mobs orchestrated by Suharto, and backed by the American and British governments.
Indeed, the collaboration of western governments, together with the role of western business, laid the pattern for subsequent Anglo-American violence across the world: such as Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup was backed in Washington and London; the arming of the shah of Iran and the creation of his secret police; and the lavish and meticulous backing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, including black propaganda by the Foreign Office which sought to discredit press reports that he had used nerve gas against the Kurdish village of Halabja.
In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy furnished General Suharto with roughly 5,000 names. These were people marked for assassination, and a senior American diplomat checked off the names as they were killed or captured. Most were members of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto's army, Washington secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipment whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Council advising the president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto's generals to co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in.
The Americans worked closely with the British. The British ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, cabled the Foreign Office: "I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change." The "little shooting" saw off between half a million and a million people.
However, it was in the field of propaganda, of "managing" the media and eradicating the victims from people's memory in the west, that the British shone. British intelligence officers outlined how the British press and the BBC could be manipulated. "Treatment will need to be subtle," they wrote, "e.g., a) all activities should be strictly unattributable, b) British [government] participation or co-operation should be carefully concealed." To achieve this, the Foreign Office opened a branch of its Information Research Department (IRD) in Singapore.
The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of Her Majesty's most experienced liars. Reddaway and his colleagues manipulated the "embedded" press and the BBC so expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret message that the fake story he had promoted -- that a communist takeover was imminent in Indonesia -- "went all over the world and back again". He described how an experienced Sunday newspaper journalist agreed "to give exactly your angle on events in his article ... i.e., that this was a kid-glove coup without butchery".
These lies, bragged Reddaway, could be "put almost instantly back to Indonesia via the BBC". Prevented from entering Indonesia, Roland Challis, the BBC's south-east Asia correspondent, was unaware of the slaughter. "My British sources purported not to know what was going on," Challis told me, "but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it ... Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal."
The bloodbath was ignored almost entirely by the BBC and the rest of the western media. The headline news was that "communism" had been overthrown in Indonesia, which, Time reported, "is the west's best news in Asia". In November 1967, at a conference in Geneva overseen by the billionaire banker David Rockefeller, the booty was handed out. All the corporate giants were represented, from General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank and US Steel to ICI and British American Tobacco. With Suharto's connivance, the natural riches of his country were carved up.
Suharto's cut was considerable. When he was finally overthrown in 1998, it was estimated that he had up to $10 billion in foreign banks, or more than 10 per cent of Indonesia's foreign debt. When I was last in Jakarta, I walked to the end of his leafy street and caught sight of the mansion where the mass murderer now lives in luxury. As Saddam Hussein heads for his own show trial on 19 October, he must ask himself where he went wrong. Compared with Suharto's crimes, Saddam's seem second-division.
With British-supplied Hawk jets and machine-guns, Suharto's army went on to crush the life out of a quarter of the population of East Timor: 200,000 people. Using the same Hawk jets and machine-guns, the same genocidal army is now attempting to crush the life out of the resistance movement in West Papua and protect the Freeport company, which is mining a mountain of copper in the province. (Henry Kissinger is "director emeritus" of this enterprise.) Some 100,000 Papuans, 18 per cent of the population, have been killed; yet this British-backed "project", as new Labour likes to say, is almost never reported.
What happened in Indonesia, and continues to happen, is almost a mirror image of the attack on Iraq. Both countries have riches coveted by the west; both had dictators installed by the west to facilitate the passage of their resources; and in both countries, blood-drenched Anglo-American actions have been disguised by propaganda willingly provided by journalists prepared to draw the necessary distinctions between Saddam's regime ("monstrous") and Suharto's ("moderate" and "stable").
Since the invasion of Iraq, I have spoken to a number of principled journalists working in the pro-war media, including the BBC, who say that they and many others "lie awake at night" and want to speak out and resume being real journalists. I suggest now is the time.
John Pilger's book 'Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs' is published in paperback by Vintage.
To contact the Free West Papua Campaign, e-mail [samoxen@aol.com] or phone 01865 241200
A clean(ish) New Orleans joke FBI agents have reason to believe the New Orleans disaster was no long caused by hurricane Katrine, but now suspect it was a suicide plumber.
Oh come on, I've heard worse but this isn't the place. Maybe I'll pop over to sj!
Is this action? Hello.
On the news, there's the ecoli outbreak in Wales, and a boy of 5 has just died from it.
Story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4307442.stm
I'm not going to start moaning about the state of school dinners, because there's always been an option to take sandwhiches, something which the parents of a lot of kids seem to forget, even though it's healthier & cheaper. But like I said, I'm not going to start moaning about that...
What I am going to moan about is the governments response to a child dying.
A child dies because of contaminated food given to schools across Wales.
The response?
"...an assembly committee would begin to look into the terms of reference for a "no holds barred" inquiry on the E.coli outbreak."
I may misunderstand, but this seems to be a meeting to discuss details of an inquiry. Should this not have started as soon as the outbreak was reported?
Can you imagine, if YOUR child dies and you ask what's going to be done to prevent it happening to someone else, and you're told "well, we're going to have a meeing to discuss what our Committee Will be discussing when they are ready to form an inquiry, the results of which will be compiled by a seperate Results Committee, and put forward to a Select Committee to bring the changes in place by 2047"
Bored at work, annoyed at those who govern us.
And it's only Tuesday.
7/7 aftermath in the thames valley…. this happened this summer - I've had nagging doubts about posting it as I've posted so much other heavy stuff this year but feel it has to be discussed.
during an excellent rave in summer, in a beautiful oxfordshire location I was with a group of friends and even then we could not get away from discussing the bombs and 7/7 and what was going on in our area. I'd already noticed Reading was full of cops these days, and we all thought the only reason this rave hadn't been busted was because the cops were otherwise occupied in towns and cities.
some of the people in our group lived in the Wycombe/Aylesbury areas and were watching at first hand the tension in the streets; one of the bombers was from aylesbury and chavs tried to burn out his former family house (fucking idiots, it was a terrace and loads of people got evacuated because of it and they also were destroying vital forensic evidence that could be used to track other dangerous terrorists)
as the flames were put out and the cordons raised, the chavs of aylesbury fought each other in the streets along racial lines. But the impression I was getting from what my friends were saying and other posts on SJ and other places is that they were fully enjoying the fight, as if every young man had been waiting for this situation to happen (not suprising as there has always been an amount of racial tension in that area)
but the worst was yet to come. One bloke at the rave said he would fully understand it if a young unemployed white lad strapped explosives to himself, went into the mosque on Friday and blew the lot to kingdom come (or Mecca?) as a reprisal for the 7/7 attacks.
Incidentally although I am Asian (but not a Muslim) I did not even find the comment in the slightest offensive; I could fully understand his emotions in discussing this - I would stress that this guy is not a racist thug (he is a very intelligent man who is a friend of mine and is anti-war / otherwise progressive in his politics), and nor was he volunteering or planning to carry out such an attack!
He did agree that the only net result would be a further deplorable loss of lives and then an escalation of a war over resources into a race war.His impression was that he clearly did not really want such an event to happen, but he wouldn't be surprised if it did.
And all this came out at a rave where we were all friends and all in a good mood. I dread to think what sort of discussions (or even plans) are happening in less happier places of Britain - and its a stark reminder of how high feelings are running at the moment..
INT : Geldof – the man who betrayed the poor. A sad story of what happens when one man jumps on a bandwagon and vastly over-estimates his own power in a chaotic, angry world...
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/09/06/the-man-who-betrayed-the-poor
Even as the G8 promises fall apart, Geldof stays silent [url=""][/url]
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th September 2005
Two months have not elapsed since the G8 summit, and already almost everything has turned to ashes. Even the crustiest sceptics have been shocked by the speed with which its promises have been broken.
It is true that they didn’t amount to much. The World Development Movement described the agreement as “a disaster for the world’s poor.”(1) ActionAid complained that “the G8 have completely failed to deliver trade justice.”(2) Christian Aid called July 8th as “a sad day for poor people in Africa and all over the world.”(3) Oxfam lamented that “neither the necessary sense of urgency nor the historic potential of Gleneagles was grasped by the G8.”(4) But one man had a different view. Bob Geldof, who organised the Live8 events, announced that “a great justice has been done. .. On aid, 10 out of 10; on debt, eight out of 10 … Mission accomplished frankly.”(5)
Had he not signed off like this, had he not gone on to describe a South African campaigner who had criticised the deal as “a disgrace”(6), Geldof could have walked away from the summit unencumbered by further responsibility. He could have spent the rest of his life on holiday, and no one would have minded. But it was because he gave the G8 his seal of approval, because he told us, in effect, that we could all go home and stop worrying about Africa that he now has a responsibility to speak out.
The uses to which a Geldof can be put are limited. Before the summit he was seen by campaigners as naïve, ill-informed and unaccountable. But he can make public statements with the potential to embarrass politicians. While they don’t usually rise above the “give us your focking money” level, they do have the effect of capturing the attention of the press. But though almost everything he said he was fighting for has fallen apart, he has yet to tell the public.
Immediately after the summit, as the world’s attention shifted to the London bombs, Germany and Italy announced that they might not be able to meet the commitments they had just made, due to “budgetary constraints”(7). A week later, on July 15th, the World Development Movement obtained leaked documents showing that four of the IMF’s European directors were trying to overturn the G8’s debt deal(8). Four days after that, Gordon Brown dropped a bomb. He admitted that the aid package the G8 leaders had promised “includes the numbers for debt relief.”(9) The extra money they had promised for aid and the extra money they had promised for debt relief were in fact one and the same.
Nine days after that, on July 28th, the United States, which had appeared to give some ground at Gleneagles, announced a pact with Australia, China and India to undermine the Kyoto protocol on climate change(10). On August 2nd, leaked documents from the World Bank showed that the G8 had not in fact granted 100% debt relief to 18 countries, but had promised enough money only to write off their repayments for the next three years(11). On August 3rd, the United Nations revealed that only one third of the money needed for famine relief in Niger, and 14% of the money needed by Mali had been pledged by the rich nations(12). Some 5 million people in the western Sahel remained at risk of starvation.
Two weeks ago, we discovered that John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, had proposed 750 amendments to the agreement which is meant to be concluded at next week’s UN summit. He was, in effect, striking out the Millennium Development Goals on health, education and poverty relief, which the United Nations set in 2000(13). Yesterday, ActionAid released a report showing that the first of these goals – equal access to schooling for boys and girls by 2005 – has been missed in over 70 countries(14). “Africa”, it found, “is currently projected to miss every goal.” There is so little resolve at the UN to do anything about it that the summit could deliver “a worse outcome than the situation before the G8.” Yet Geldof remains silent.
“We are very critical of what Bob Geldof did during the G8 Summit”, Demba Moussa Dembele of the African Forum on Alternatives tells me. “He did it for his self-promotion. This is why he marginalized African singers, putting the limelight on himself and Bono, rather than on the issues. … The objectives of the whole Live8 campaign had little to do with poverty reduction in Africa. It was a scheme intended to project Geldof and Blair as humanitarian figures coming to the rescue of “poor and helpless” Africans.”(15)
“Right from the beginning,” says Kofi Mawuli Klu of the Forum of African Human Rights Defenders, “he has acted in his own selfish interests. It was all about self-promotion, about usurping the place of Africans. His message was “shut up and watch me”. Without even understanding the root causes of the problems, he used his role to drown the voices of the African people and replace them with his own. There are many knowledgeable people – African and non-African – who could have advised him, but he has been on his own, ego-tripping.”(16)
I have heard similar sentiments from every African campaigner I have spoken to. Bob Geldof is beginning to look like Mother Teresa or Joy Adamson. To the corporate press, and therefore to most of the public, he is a saint. Among those who know something about the issues, he is detested. Those other tabloid saints appeared to recognise that if they rattled the cages of the powerful, the newspapers upon which their public regard depended would turn against them. When there was a conflict between their public image and their cause, the image won. It seems to me that Geldof has played the same game.
He seized a campaign which commanded great public enthusiasm, which had the potential gravely to embarrass Tony Blair and George Bush. He asked us to focus not on the harm the G8 leaders were doing, but on the help they might give. When they failed to deliver, he praised them anyway. His endorsement and the public forgetfulness it prompted helped license them to start reversing their commitments. When they did so, he said nothing. This looks to me like more than just political naivity. It looks as if he is working for the other side.
I don’t mean that this is what he intended – or intends – to do. I mean that he came to identify with the people he was supposed to be lobbying. By ensuring that the campaign was as much about him as about Africa, he ensured that if they failed, he failed. He needed a story with a happy ending.
There is just one thing that Geldof can now do for Africa. This is to announce that his optimism was misplaced, that the mission was not accomplished, that the struggle for justice is as urgent as ever. But while he holds his tongue, he will remain the man who betrayed the poor.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. World Development Movement, 8th July 2005. G8 condemn Africa to miss Millennium Development Goals. Press Release.
2. ActionAid, 8th July 2005. ActionAid’s reaction to the G8 outcome. Press Release.
3. Christian Aid, 12th July 2005. The G8 - in terms of build-ups it couldn’t have been bigger. Press release.
4. Oxfam, 29th July 2005. Gleneagles: what really happened at the G8 summit? http://www.oxfam.org/eng/pdfs/bn050729_G8_final.pdf
5. DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), 8th July 2005. Bono, Geldof Reaction to G8 Africa Communique. Press release; Ewen MacAskill, Patrick Wintour and Larry Elliott, 9th July 2005. G8: hope for Africa but gloom over climate. The Guardian; Mark Townsend, 10th July 2005. Geldof delighted at G8 action on aid. The Observer.
6. Matthew Tempest, 8th July 2005. G8 leaders agree $50bn Africa package. The Guardian.
7. Oxfam, 29th July 2005, ibid.
8. WDM, 15th July 2005. Leaks reveal IMF threat to already weak G8 debt deal. Press release.
9. Minutes of Evidence Taken before Treasury Committee, 19th July 2005. To be published as HC 399-i. House of Commons. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmtreasy/uc399-i/uc39902.htm
10. Eg ABC online, 27th July 27 2005. Australia, US form climate change pact: report. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s1423298.htm
11. World Development Movement and Jubilee Debt Campaign, 2nd August 2005. Leaks reveal G8 debt deal faces funding shortfall. Press release.
12. BBC Online, 3rd August 2005. Hunger in Mali is being ‘ignored’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4741877.stm
13. Eg Julian Borger, 26th August 2005. Bolton throws UN summit into chaos. The Guardian.
14. Patrick Watt, 5th September 2005. Development Under Attack: will the 2005 poverty agenda unravel at the UN World Summit? ActionAid.
15. Demba Moussa Dembele, 3rd September 2005. By email.
16. Kofi Mawuli Klu, 4th September 2005. By phone.
Jewish group denounces rave video on Auschwitz Jewish group denounces video on Auschwitz
Posted on Wed, Aug. 10, 2005
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/12350153.htm
JOCELYN GECKER
Associated Press
PARIS - An Internet video that depicts the Nazi death camp Auschwitz as a rave party drew sharp criticism Wednesday from a Jewish rights group, which urged authorities to have it removed from European Web sites.
The three-minute video titled "Housewitz" - a pun on house music and Auschwitz - casts Nazi soldiers as DJs. It alternates black-and-white still photos of Holocaust atrocities with color images of youths at an outdoor party. And it advertises a "Free taxi ride home," showing a wheelbarrow full of corpses.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center's European office denounced the video as "outrageous," saying it goes "beyond the bounds of freedom of expression to an unprecedented level of obscenity."
The center asked the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to call on countries where Web sites have posted the video to "immediately stop the spread of this pernicious nihilism."
Jaroslaw Mensfeld, a spokesman for the museum at the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland, said he was "absolutely shocked." Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at the Nazi camp during World War II. "I don't understand how a person can make such a movie," he said.
The film is featured on one Dutch and two Polish Web sites, the Wiesenthal Center said.
The Dutch Web site, Geenstijl, says it's doing nothing wrong in posting the video. The site, whose name means "no style," says it mixes news with "light subjects and pleasantly twisted nonsense." It has published a disclaimer saying it copied the video after learning it was being talked about in Internet chat rooms.
"We didn't make the video, but it is an integral part of the discussion by our viewers. It's not illegal and we don't intend to remove it from the site," said Oscar van Wijland, one of the Web site's writers.
According to the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet, the video's maker is a 22-year-old Dutch student. Six weeks ago, the bureau received a complaint about the video and had it pulled from three Web sites.
Later, when the Geenstijl site posted the film, the complaints bureau went to the Amsterdam Public Prosecutor but was told the video was "not illegal enough" to prosecute, the bureau said. It plans to appeal.
---
Associated Press Writer Arthur Max in Amsterdam contributed to this report.
TT : Random bomb attack in main street This happened on 2005-07-11 [shortly after the London attacks] in Port of Spain, the main city of Trinidad and Tobago.
in many ways I find the comments of the cops and military that this wasn't linked to the ongoing world conflict even more chilling.. are some people of Trinidad that angry and violent they leave a bomb in the main street without any warning whatsoever? I know there is plenty of poverty and gang trouble in the West Indies but didn't think things were that bad...
THE Capital city was convulsed after what military investigators confirmed was a bomb exploded in a garbage bin yesterday in front of Maraj Jewellers at the corner of Frederick and Queen Streets, Port of Spain. The incident is not being viewed as a terrorist act but the city was under lockdown following the event and all of last night. But business is expected to resume as usual today.
Fifteen persons were injured when, just after 2 p.m., the device which had been placed in a wrought iron bin outside of the store tore through the iron container sending shrapnel flying everywhere.
Unsuspecting passersby as well as a few vendors selling alongside the wall of the jewelry store were injured , their flesh exposed as bit of steel tore through them.
The most serious injury was suffered by passerby Yvonne McIvor whose leg had to be amputated. One other person is said to be critical.
The window of the Maraj store bore a small hole and the revolving door was warped from the force of the blast.
Across the street at Payless Shoe Store a piece of iron from the bin blasted a hole through the store's large glass injuring a customer standing inside.
Military explosives experts led by Major Roger Best initially took the lead in investigating the scene when the intent of the act was not yet certain. The investigation was eventually handed over to the police after it was deemed to be a criminal act. The police were assisted by US bomb experts who are currently in Trinidad training the Customs K-9 Unit in bomb and explosives detection.
The dogs were employed to sniff the area and nearby stores to ensure that no other explosives were present.
"Terrorism is not what we are entertaining at this time in terms of this event," military sources told the Daily Express. "There was no motive and no specific target, we cannot say that the perpetrators had a specific intent. We believe it was just a random act."
The Daily Express was told that the device used in yesterday's explosion was homemade, did not carry a timer and was in a plastic container.
"We could not detect any evidence of a timer. The fact that it went off near where watches and cell phones were being sold could be a throw off, but we are pretty certain one was not present," the source said.
"It is the kind of bomb that could be made from home ingredients like ammonium nitrate, which can be found in fertilisers," military sources said.
They also said that the person or persons responsible for yesterday's tragedy either knew exactly what they were doing, or pulled what they thought would have been a harmless prank.
"Why we say this is because the bomb itself, the device, on its own was pretty harmless, but the fact that it was placed in the wrought iron bin, made it potentially deadly," the military officer said.
"All of the damage that was done yesterday, the people who were injured, injuries to property was all done by shrapnel from the iron bin. The device was only dangerous because it was placed in the bin. So the person who put it there, either knows exactly what the effect would be, or on the other hand, they placed it there, thinking that in its iron container, it would be completely harmless."
Police investigators on the scene said according to reports they received, the bomb went off after a vagrant digging through the bin picked it up and dropped it back.
They also said they were looking at three suspects, one of whom is possibly among the injured.
Outside of the town, forces had to be employed at the Beetham Highway as the mass exodus from the city caused a bumper to bumper traffic jam, and a number of robberies were said to have been carried out at that location.
WARNING very graphic photo in this link
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_news?id=88782248
Galloway praises Iraq ‘martyrs’ MP George Galloway is being accused of putting UK troops at risk after calling insurgents in Iraq "martyrs".
During a tour of the Middle East, Mr Galloway spoke of "poor Iraqis" using the most basic weapons to write the names of their towns "in the stars".
The Respect MP accused the UK and America of "raping" Baghdad and said the US was losing the war.
Labour MP Eric Joyce said the comments endangered UK troops "in a small way" but Mr Galloway held little influence.
Mr Galloway's Respect party stresses that it and the Bethnal Green and Bow MP condemn suicide bombings, whether in London or the Middle East.
Any loss of civilian life is profoundly wrong, says the party, but it blames the US-UK coalition for turning Iraq into a war zone by their invasion.
Mr Galloway claimed the insurgents were ordinary Iraqis defending their country against "foreign invaders".
"It can be said, truly said, that the Iraqi resistance is not just defending Iraq. They are defending all the Arabs and they are defending all the people of the world against American hegemony."
'Martyrs'
In one speech, the MP said: "These poor Iraqis - ragged people, with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons - are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which has made the country ungovernable.
"We don't know who they are, we don't know their names, we never saw their faces, they don't put up photographs of their martyrs, we don't know the names of their leaders."
Mr Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party over his outspoken remarks about the Iraq war.
He told Syrian Television: "Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad.
"The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will.
"The daughters are crying for help and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters."
Troop dangers?
Mr Galloway said Tony Blair's idea of a "war on terrorism" was absurd as terrorism was a tactic, not a strategy.
"It's not the Muslims who are sick. It's Bush and Blair and Berlusconi who are sick. It's not the Muslims who need to be cured. It's the imperialist countries that need to be cured."
Falkirk MP Mr Joyce said Mr Galloway was trying to maximise his infamy in the UK with his latest comments, which would not impress people in the Middle East.
"It clearly puts British troops at greater risk in a small way and that is a pity," he said.
Mr Joyce said the words would at least be seen as encouraging resistance in Iraq and would upset troops' families in the UK.
But he said Mr Galloway was now a "marginal" figure who had limited influence.
'Occupation'
John Rees, national secretary of Respect, told BBC News the Iraqi resistance would not be encouraged to attack UK troops by what British politicians had said.
"Respect and George Galloway have made it plain on a number of occasions that we believe that the people who are putting British troops at risk are the people who have sent them to occupy someone else's country," he said.
Mr Rees said troops' families were often the most vociferous opponents of the Iraq war.
Labour MP Bruce George, former chairman of the Commons defence committee, said UK and US troops would leave Iraq if there was an end to the insurgency waged by remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime and religious fanatics.
The UK wanted to see Iraq's democratically elected government succeed, he said.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw this week said the UK was part of the security problem in Iraq and things are "not good" in the country.
He said an agreement on the new Iraqi constitution would be a step to reducing UK troops in Iraq.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/4744685.stm
Published: 2005/08/04 11:09:46 GMT
if you have any idea smash racism whenever you see it
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/4730559.stm
Teenager murdered in axe attack
A teenager has been murdered with an axe in a racist attack by a gang, police say.
Student Anthony Walker, 18, died in hospital after being attacked in Huyton, Merseyside, on Friday night.
Mr Walker had been taunted while at a bus stop on St John's Road with his girlfriend and a male cousin. They moved but were attacked in a park.
His girlfriend and cousin, both 17, ran to get help, but when they returned he was on the ground with head injuries.
'Unprovoked, racist attack'
Merseyside Police Assistant Chief Constable Bernard Lawson said: "What we are dealing with here is an unprovoked and vicious attack on a young black man which we believe to be racially motivated.
"This was a despicable act and we're absolutely determined to find the people responsible.
"Our first thoughts go out to his family and we have met his mother and his sister and they are bearing up tremendously.
"Anthony was a young Christian studying for his A levels and wanting to be a lawyer."
Mr Walker was taken to Whiston Hospital but transferred to Walton neurological centre where he died of his injuries after being attacked with an axe.
Mr Lawson urged local people to help catch the killers.
"We believe the offenders are local and we believe it is the responsibility of the local community to give these people up," he said.
"There are a lot of decent people in the local area who are absolutely shocked at what has happened."
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