Galloway: Jews Don't Have to Be on the Side of Apartheid

Place: Oxford Union
Time: 14/10/13

Zionist Smartypants (referring to an earlier declaration by Galloway that he doesn't debate Israelis):

If I said in a debate that I would not debate with a Pakistani, I would rightly be called a racist. My question for you is: Are you a racist? (Vigorous applause)

George Galloway:

Why are you applauding that? What kind of people would applaud that? Am I a racist? You've sat through the last hour and a half of me speaking and you're applauding someone asking me if I'm a racist? What kind of people are you? Or do you just applaud anything? Would you just applaud anything?

I'll let you in on something you don't know. I'm one of the few people on the Left in Britain who travelled the length and breadth of South Africa as an underground agent of the ANC led by Nelson Mandela, then in Pollsmoor Prison in Capetown. Therefore, the subject of apartheid is particularly important to me. The question of racism is particularly important to me and, in parenthesis, let me tell you this: throughout the entirety of my time underground in South Africa under apartheid, every house I slept in, every dinner I ate, every car I drove in was provided by Jewish activists of the ANC.

So Jews don't have to be on the side of apartheid (Applause), they don't have to be on the side of racism (Vigorous applause). Jewish heroes - amongst my blood brotherhood, like Denis Goldberg, who served 27 years on Robben Island, in Pollsmoor Prison, but never was able to touch Mandela and his comrades because they were on one side of the apartheid prison wall, and he and a few other Jewish heroes of the ANC were on the other. Denis Goldberg, Albie Sachs, Joe Slovo, Ruth First - perhaps you've heard of these people. If you haven't, look them up. Jews don't have to be on the side of apartheid. They can stand up against it, and I say to those who imagine that they are friends of the state of Israel, whose flag was just waved in my face, turn away from the racist, apartheid ideology of Zionism. Turn back towards where Jews were before the emergence of the hegemony of Zionism.

The greatest people on the earth were Jews. The leaders of the socialists, communists, trade unions, liberal enlightenment, throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, were great Jews. Marx himself was a Jew. None of them believed that, as Jews, they should go and take somebody else's country, and drive millions of them around the world as refugees. All of them would have turned their backs against such an ideology. But because of my experience in South Africa... because of my time in South Africa, because of the decades that I worked against apartheid in South Africa, do you imagine that I would turn up at a university and debate apartheid with a supporter of the apartheid regime from South Africa? I'd rather punch him in the face than debate with him. Why? Because apartheid is a racist poison. It is the worst kind of fascism, and I would never debate with any supporter of South African apartheid. Why should I debate with a supporter of Israeli apartheid?