UK MP George Galloway, known for his support of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, has lost his seat in the UK parliamentary elections held last week. According to an Investigative Project report:
British MP George Galloway, friend to Hamas in Gaza, Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad and other dictators, lost his bid for re-election to Parliament representing Bradford West Thursday by a 2-1 margin.
Newcomer Naz Shah, a Muslim feminist of Pakistani descent, won 19,977 votes to the incumbent Galloway’s 8,557.
During the campaign, Shah told of her roots in poverty and domestic violence, including an abandoning father, an abusive step-father, and a forced marriage as a teenager in Pakistan. Galloway thought it was a good idea to challenge Shah’s story and call her a liar.
While Galloway is notoriously anti-Israel – last August he “declared Bradford an Israel-free zone … We don’t want any Israeli goods. We don’t want any Israeli services. We don’t want any Israeli academics, coming to the university or the college.” But Thursday’s drubbing in the district with a large conservative Muslim community, seemed to turn on issues much closer to home.
While he congratulated the Labour party on winning the seat, he seemed more peeved by “others who are already celebrating: the venal, the vile, the racists and the Zionists will all be celebrating.”
Judging by social media reactions, people of all stripes seem to be rejoicing at Galloway’s humiliating loss.
Read the rest here.
George Galloway had originally been a far-left British M.P. who was expelled from the Labor Party over incendiary comments made at time of the 2003 Iraq War. He subsequently formed the Respect Coalition which prior to a 2007 split included the Socialist Workers Party and members of the Muslim Association of Britain and Muslim Council of Britain, essentially the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain. The Respect coalition was the sponsor of the February 2003 anti-Iraq war demonstration in London, reported by police to have been the largest demonstration ever held in the U.K. A previous post discussed the 2007 falling out between Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party and the speculation that the difficulties stemmed from Galloway’s desire to focus more on developing a Muslim constituency. At that time, Galloway launched a new movement called Respect Renewal which helped to elect Mr Galloway as a Respect MP. As discussed in a post from May 2007, Mr. Galloway lost his seat in the House of Commons, the only seat held by the Respect Party. However, he was re-elected in 2012 and UK. Daily Telegraph writer Andrew Gilligan had posted an article which analyzed Galloway’s victory at that time and his appeals to Islam during the campaign.
