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Galloway and Hitchens slug it out

Thread ID: 20252 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-09-16

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weisbrot [OP]

2005-09-16 18:35 | User Profile

[url]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1782348,00.html[/url]

Galloway and Hitchens slug it out From James Bone in New York

GEORGE GALLOWAY, the anti-Iraq war Respect Party MP for Bethnal Green, is guilty of “sinister piffle”. On the other hand, Christopher Hitchens, the pro-intervention polemicist who writes a column for Vanity Fair, practises “Goebbellian tricks”.

The two rivals in the raging row over Iraq engaged in an intellectual prize fight in New York on Wednesday night. Before a jeering crowd of more than 1,000 people in a college auditorium, the two master rhetoricians — once allies on the Left — hurled invective at each other for almost two hours.

A scruffy, sweating Mr Hitchens accused Mr Galloway of being an apologist for dictators, fresh from Damascus, where he had praised the 145 attacks a day by Iraqi insurgents on coalition troops. “The man’s hunt for a tyrannical fatherland never ends,” he said. “The Soviet Union let him down; Albania’s gone; the Red Army’s out of Afghanistan; Saddam’s been overthrown . . . But on to the next, in Damascus.”

Mr Galloway, tanned and looking worthy of his “Gorgeous George” nickname in a well-pressed beige suit, denounced Mr Hitchens as an ex-Trotskyist stooge for a reactionary government in Washington bent on dominating the Iraqi people. “People like Mr Hitchens are willing to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood,” he said to wild applause. “How I wish he would put on a tin hat and pick up a gun and go and fight himself.”

The showdown grew out of a clash between the two when Mr Galloway testified in May before a US Senate sub- committee that had accused him of profiting from the Oil-for-Food scandal. At that chaotic meeting, Mr Galloway extravagantly dismissed the British journalist as a [B]“drink-soaked, former Trotskyist popinjay”. [/B] Mr Hitchens responded by challenging the MP to a proper debate.

Mr Galloway accepted while on an anti-war speaking tour of America, during which he is promoting his new book about the Senate hearings, Mr Galloway Goes to Washington. The two British proxies offered to their American audiencearguments over Iraq that are seldom articulated so vigorously in the United States.

Though a vote was not taken, the motion before the audience was: “The war in Iraq was necessary and just.”

Mr Galloway contrasted his opponent’s past record of support for Palestinian fighters and opposition to the first Iraq war in 1991 to his current pro-war stance. [B]Unabashed, Mr Hitchens conceded that his views had changed since 1991. “I have not repudiated them. It’s just that I no longer hold to them,” [/B] he said to hoots of derison from the audience.

[B]Even as accomplished a demagogue as Mr Galloway eventually overstepped the mark. To boos, he suggested that American foreign policy was to blame for the September 11 attacks, particularly Washington support for Israel.[/B] But Mr Hitchens quickly blundered, too, by issuing an unpopular defence of the Bush Administration’s handling of the flooding of New Orleans.

“I think it was a tie,” Michael Thompson, a political science Professor at William Patterson University in New Jersey, said. “It was more rhetorical than it was substantive. There was just too much ad hominem oratory.”

Among those watching was Oona King, the Labour MP defeated by Mr Galloway at the general election. “I think Galloway won in terms of oratory skills,” she said. “I think it’s great to see Britons bringing the tradition of debate to the United States. But at the end of the day, they are two very arrogant men who both have very flawed arguments.”

Sertorius

2005-09-16 19:13 | User Profile

Weisbrot,

This debate is online and worth watching just for the rhetoric alone. Both men are quite skilled. [QUOTE]“I think it was a tie,” Michael Thompson, a political science Professor at William Patterson University in New Jersey, said. “It was more rhetorical than it was substantive. There was just too much ad hominem oratory.”[/QUOTE] I think Galloway won this, though I have only slightly more use for him than I do Hitchens. Hitchens stayed on the defensive for the most part and did look quite uncomfortable.