| November 5, 2007: This website is an archive of the former website, traprockpeace.org, which was created 10 years ago by Charles Jenks. It became one of the most populace sites in the US, and an important resource on the antiwar movement, student activism, 'depleted' uranium and other topics. Jenks authored virtually all of its web pages and multimedia content (photographs, audio, video, and pdf files. As the author and registered owner of that site, his purpose here is to preserve an important slice of the history of the grassroots peace movement in the US over the past decade. He is maintaining this historical archive as a service to the greater peace movement, and to the many friends of Traprock Peace Center. Blogs have been consolidated and the calendar has been archived for security reasons; all other links remain the same, and virtually all blog content remains intact. THIS SITE NO LONGER REFLECTS THE CURRENT AND ONGOING WORK OF TRAPROCK PEACE CENTER, which has reorganized its board and moved to Greenfield, Mass. To contact Traprock Peace Center, call 413-773-7427 or visit its site. Charles Jenks is posting new material to PeaceJournal.org, a multimedia blog and resource center.
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See also National Tour Website
Download audion and see photos of September 24th Tour Finale in DC
NEW See Transcript of this talk.
George Galloway, MP Welcomed in Madison and
Chicago
September 18-19, 2005
"We have to face the fact that for the powerful people
who rule the world, the blood of some people is more valuable than the blood
of others....
And though this self-evident truth may not be burned on the minds of the majority
of our countrymen,
believe me there is not a Muslim in the whole world that does not know the
double standard that we have on this subject."
September 19, 2005
Chicago, Illinois
George
Galloway spoke to over 600 people in Thorn Auditorium at Northwestern University
Law School. See Todd Chretien's account of his stops in Madison and Chicago,
below.
Loretta Capeheart, Ph.D., introduced the speakers and served as moderator. Preceding Mr. Galloway were Bill Davis, Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Ahmed Shawki, Editor of International Socialist Review and a board member of the National Council of Arab Americans; and Sabah Khan, a student and member of the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) chapter at University of Illinois at Chicago. CAN collected donations for hurricane relief that a group of students is taking to the Gulf States.
Copyright Notice: Download and listen to audio of the introductory speakers, George Galloway's speech, and his Questions and Answers. Audio is available for non-commercial use only; any other use requires the permission of George Galloway. Radio airplay is encouraged and only requires attribution and prior notification (not prior permission) to Traprock Peace Center at 413-773-7427 or by email. Attribution shall be as follows: "Copyright 2005 Traprock Peace Center; all rights reserved. Non-profit use permitted with notification and this attribution." The national sponsors - The New Press, The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, International Socialist Review, and the National Council of Arab Americans - have permission to use the audio for any non-commercial purpose, including posting on their websites; attribution only is requested.
George Galloway's Talk
MP3
- 57:13 minutes - 19.7 mb - 48 kbps mono
High bandwidth version for radio
http://www.grassrootspeace.org/audio/galloway_chi_091905_96k.mp3
George Galloway's Questions and Answers
MP3
- 19:00 minutes - 6.6 mb - 48 kbps mono
Introductory presentations - Bill Davis, Ahmed
Shawki, Sabah Khan, Loretta Capeheart (moderator)
MP3
- 31:21 minutes - 10.8 mb - 48 kbps mono
September 20, 2005
Mid-West Welcomes Galloway
Todd Chretien
Over 1,000 people filled the Wisconsin Union Theatre on Sunday night and more
600 came to Northwestern Law School’s Thorne Auditorium to hear George
Galloway on Monday night, making it one of the largest left-wing political
meetings in years in Chicago.
We were greeted in Madison by a motley crew of 25 College Republicans, which
Mr. Galloway referred to as a “mass demonstration of neo-cons.”
At least they were good for a laugh.
“We’re out here with the College Republicans, making sure that
people know this campus supports the troops,” UW- Madison senior Robert
Thelen to Elizabeth Wachowski from the Wisconsin State Journal. “We
will support the troops whether they come home tomorrow, in a year or in 10
years.”
I’m sure the troops will be happy to hear that their non-enlisted friends
will “support” them in Iraq for the next decade. As Mr. Galloway
said of Hitchens, “people like that are willing to fight to the last
drop of other people’s blood.”
In Chicago, the expert technicians at Thorne hooked Mr. Galloway up to a wireless
microphone, giving him the freedom to roam around the stage, inspiring a stand-up
comic streak. The audience was in stitches half the time as Mr. Galloway put
his collection of one-liners and witty stories, honed through thirty years
of parliamentary duels, to good use.
Here’s my favorite,
“I don’t believe that Mr. Bush is a Christian. Christians believe
in the prophets, peace be upon them. Bush believes in profits and how to get
a piece of them.”
That brought the house down.
But as funny as it was, the comedy was only a means to an end for Mr. Galloway.
Both the Madison and Chicago speeches aimed at the serious business of convincing
his American audience that our government’s policies have caused unimaginable
pain in the real lives of tens of millions of Muslims and Arabs all around
the world.
Even most anti-war activists underestimate this. Mr. Galloway illustrated
this by pointing out that Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, had recently
been welcomed to New York City, only days after the anniversary of the massacre
of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Southern Lebanon
more than two decades earlier. He asked the audience in both Madison and Chicago
how many of them marked the massacre’s anniversary, and while many people
were very much aware of it once it was mentioned, only a very few had recalled
it before hand. Mr. Galloway acknowledged this and then explained that, in
the Arab and Muslim world, most people remember the day every year and remain
in a permanent state of shock that Bush could call Sharon, the Israeli general
who oversaw the massacre, a “man of peace.” Sharon himself, Galloway
noted, does not consider himself a man of peace.
This gap between the fuzzy consciousness on the part of the American anti-war
movement of the crimes inflicted on the Arab and Muslim world by the US and
the UK and the acute knowledge on the part of the victims of those crimes
must be overcome.
Of course, Bill O’Reilly doesn’t see it that way. But he was gracious
enough to invite Mr. Galloway on his show. O’Reilly, the loudest barking
dog at Fox News, played possum, eschewing his normal “shut up”
routine, perhaps because he was afraid he’d more than meet his match
in a real mano-a-mano. Instead, he said, “I have seven questions for
you.” Of course the first one was, “why are you such an ardent
supporter of Saddam Hussein?” Not exactly original, but at least it
shows that someone is reading Greg Palast’s blog. Mr. Galloway had no
difficulty at all in knocking O’Reilly shabby pitching performance out
of the park. So, despite everything he’s done to the contrary, we should
all thank O’Reilly for giving several million people the chance to hear
a few actually “fair and balanced” ideas, at least for seven minutes.
Now, we’re on to walk the streets where the “Battle of Seattle”
took place six years ago (I can still recall the distinctive odor of the tear
gas mixing with the fresh Seattle air). Although the global justice movement
is much stronger around the world today than in the city that popularized
it, the fight continues. Thousands of Boeing workers have been on strike for
weeks, desperately trying to defend thousands of jobs from the corporate axes.
Mr. Galloway will be joined on the podium by one of them. You should join
him in the audience. Come on down to the University of Washington-Seattle’s
Kane Auditorium tonight at 7pm. Tickets will be available at the door, but
they’re going fast.
Complete details available at www.MrGallowayGoesToWashington.com
Todd Chretien is the Galloway National Tour Coordinator and a frequent contributor
to the International Socialist
Review.
Campus Antiwar Network students collected donations for hurricane relief that a caravan of students is taking to the Gulf States. photo © 2005 Charles Jenks
