Opinion of George Galloway

[Redalgo]

FF! Well... mostly.

[Redalgo]

Truly vile person. How anyone can vote FF for scum like that is beyond me.

In my case it was out of ignorance concerning some of his statements on the USSR, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Cuba, Hezbollah, and Western leaders who were in support of the Iraq War. My initial stance was won over by qualities of his I consider FF’esque (e.g. being socialist, environmentalist, anti-imperialist, pro-Palestinian, anti-WMD, and pro-choice) and because I lack sufficient knowledge to know what to make of the old Oil-for-Food controversy. Having read a little more about George now, however, I am somewhat more inclined to assume a neutral position and wait to see what else folks have to say about him.

[Redalgo]

Neutral? The guy is an open anti-semite who supports slaughtering innocent people as long as it's done as a stand against liberal democracy. I don't see how his views on the environment matters at all in that context. He is one of few Western politicians who openly supports anti-semitic conspiracy theories, military dictatorship and murder of political opponents.

It is not as though I approve of such conduct, if it is true. I am merely responding based on the very limited supply of information I possess. Please bear in mind that I had never even heard of this guy until the thread started, still know little about him, and waded into the thread with less than ten minutes' worth of hasty review of basic summations of his political positions and career - at no point during which I came across sentiments similar to those you are posting. The point of switching to a neutral position was to see what folks had to say about him - not to claim in any authoritative tone that the good and bad are roughly even with him.

If I were only to post in threads discussing subjects I am intimately familiar with I'd have very little to do on this forum. From time to time I am liable to make missteps, be wrong, or get confused.

[Redalgo]

My issue is not that you were uninformed about Galloway, but this took me like 2 minutes to find out. I had a hard time believing you found out about his environmental positions and managed to miss what he's best known for.

It happens. I look for ties to parties and ideologies before skimming through information on their political activities. Personal conduct and controversies are usually the last things I look at (if at all) because I expect accusations of uncertain veracity that might take me quite awhile to dig into and reach reasonably well-informed conclusions about. The information you provided is quite useful though - I appreciate it quite a bit - and in the future I probably should be less intellectually lazy when reading up on the blokes in these sorts of threads or at the least wait until a dozen or so people have posted to make sure that I didn't miss anything important before weighing in. xP