The war Israel is fighting is not about two kidnapped soldiers, it's about 15,000 strategic weapons supplied to a terrorist organisation Hezbollah by Iran and Syria whose raison d'etre is the death of every single Jew. "We do not want anything from you, we want to eliminate you". Such is the mantra of Hezbollah. It's a shame that the media and many people have been led by the nose by this dispicable organisation. How can all out war be disproportionate when your enemy's sole aim is the total destruction of your country and your people?

no change there then

NUS supported the suppression of the general strike in 1920's and has been a regular recruiting ground for British intelligence establishment since it was created.

For all his pompous bluster ( i would never vote for the guy)at least Galloway dares to speak outside
the parameters of state indoctrination and challenges the self-interestd liberal consensus.

Fuck the NUS and fuck Galloway too.

 http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0801/p09s02-coop.html
HIZBULLAH'S ATTACKS STEM FROM ISRAELI INCURSIONS INTO LEBANON
By Anders Strindberg

NEW YORK – As pundits and policymakers scramble to explain events in Lebanon, their conclusions are virtually unanimous: Hizbullah created this crisis. Israel is defending itself. The underlying problem is Arab extremism.
Sadly, this is pure analytical nonsense. Hizbullah's capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 was a direct result of Israel's silent but unrelenting aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of a six-decades long Arab-Israeli conflict.

In the Monitor
Thursday, 08/03/06

Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored "blue line" on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah's military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah's leadership; this indeed has been the pattern.

In the process of its violations, Israel has terrorized the general population, destroyed private property, and killed numerous civilians. This past February, for instance, 15-year-old shepherd Yusuf Rahil was killed by unprovoked Israeli cross-border fire as he tended his flock in southern Lebanon. Israel has assassinated its enemies in the streets of Lebanese cities and continues to occupy Lebanon's Shebaa Farms area, while refusing to hand over the maps of mine fields that continue to kill and cripple civilians in southern Lebanon more than six years after the war supposedly ended. What peace did Hizbullah shatter?

Hizbullah's capture of the soldiers took place in the context of this ongoing conflict, which in turn is fundamentally shaped by realities in the Palestinian territories. To the vexation of Israel and its allies, Hizbullah - easily the most popular political movement in the Middle East - unflinchingly stands with the Palestinians.

Since June 25, when Palestinian fighters captured one Israeli soldier and demanded a prisoner exchange, Israel has killed more than 140 Palestinians. Like the Lebanese situation, that flare-up was detached from its wider context and was said to be "manufactured" by the enemies of Israel; more nonsense proffered in order to distract from the apparently unthinkable reality that it is the manner in which Israel was created, and the ideological premises that have sustained it for almost 60 years, that are the core of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.

Once the Arabs had rejected the UN's right to give away their land and to force them to pay the price for European pogroms and the Holocaust, the creation of Israel in 1948 was made possible only by ethnic cleansing and annexation. This is historical fact and has been documented by Israeli historians, such as Benny Morris. Yet Israel continues to contend that it had nothing to do with the Palestinian exodus, and consequently has no moral duty to offer redress.

For six decades the Palestinian refugees have been refused their right to return home because they are of the wrong race. "Israel must remain a Jewish state," is an almost sacral mantra across the Western political spectrum. It means, in practice, that Israel is accorded the right to be an ethnocracy at the expense of the refugees and their descendants, now close to 5 million.

Is it not understandable that Israel's ethnic preoccupation profoundly offends not only Palestinians, but many of their Arab brethren? Yet rather than demanding that Israel acknowledge its foundational wrongs as a first step toward equality and coexistence, the Western world blithely insists that each and all must recognize Israel's right to exist at the Palestinians' expense.

Western discourse seems unable to accommodate a serious, as opposed to cosmetic concern for Palestinians' rights and liberties: The Palestinians are the Indians who refuse to live on the reservation; the Negroes who refuse to sit in the back of the bus.

By what moral right does anyone tell them to be realistic and get over themselves? That it is too much of a hassle to right the wrongs committed against them? That the front of the bus must remain ethnically pure? When they refuse to recognize their occupier and embrace their racial inferiority, when desperation and frustration causes them to turn to violence, and when neighbors and allies come to their aid - some for reasons of power politics, others out of idealism - we are astonished that they are all such fanatics and extremists.

The fundamental obstacle to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict is that we have given up on asking what is right and wrong, instead asking what is "practical" and "realistic." Yet reality is that Israel is a profoundly racist state, the existence of which is buttressed by a seemingly endless succession of punitive measures, assassinations, and wars against its victims and their allies.

A realistic understanding of the conflict, therefore, is one that recognizes that the crux is not in this or that incident or policy, but in Israel's foundational and per- sistent refusal to recognize the humanity of its Palestinian victims. Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas are driven by a desire to "wipe out Jews," as is so often claimed, but by a fundamental sense of injustice that they will not allow to be forgotten.

These groups will continue to enjoy popular legitimacy because they fulfill the need for someone - anyone - to stand up for Arab rights. Israel cannot destroy this need by bombing power grids or rocket ramps. If Israel, like its former political ally South Africa, has the capacity to come to terms with principles of democracy and human rights and accept egalitarian multiracial coexistence within a single state for Jews and Arabs, then the foundation for resentment and resistance will have been removed. If Israel cannot bring itself to do so, then it will continue to be the vortex of regional violence.

• Anders Strindberg, formerly a visiting professor at Damascus University, Syria, is a consultant on Middle East politics working with European government and law-enforcement agencies. He has also covered Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories as a journalist since the late 1990s, primarily for European publications.

Shame on them!
60-70% of the Lebanese people currently support Hizbullah resistance to the Israeli war crimes. Hizbullah part of an elected government in Lebanon. For the most part (other than the rockets fired into Israel) they have been fighting on Lebanese land defending the Lebanese people.

Hizbullah are heroes in the eyes of most working muslims and arabs in th Middle East.

Remember Jack Straw and Charles Clarke were ex presidents of the NUS and in their day passed similar "broad left" motions (i was there and opposed them then!). Sucking up to the New Labour Party will get them no where. Some of them suck up so much and so high they join "New Labour" governments!!


Neil Williams
Respect Blog

Some time ago (I was 19 and am now in my 40's) I remember handing out leaflets defending Palestine at an NUS conference and being accused by some UJS (Union of Jewish Students) twonks of being an anti-Semite.
Rubbish then, rubbish now.

I quote "UJS’ Campaign Organiser said: Regardless of your opinions on the Middle East and this country’s foreign policy, you can’t have people like Galloway making those comments”. Er, why?

If my "opinion on the middle east" is that the US and before them the UK have been using Israel to do their dirty work (and it is very very dirty) to destabilise and control the region then I would applaud Galloway for making these comments wouldn't I?

And so I do.

I hate lazy thinking almost as much as being accused of being anti Semitic for STANDING UP FOR THE OPPRESSED. It was the final anti-Semitic trick of Britain to stitch up Jews and give them Palestine (it wasn't God). It fucked them good and proper. The British ruling class knew exactly what they were doing. Divide and fucking rule. Again.

Check this out to see whay Galloway is right.

And don't accuse me of being an anti-Semite, idiot. Its hollow and facile.

 http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=galloway&search=Search

If it doesn't work go to

 http://www.youtube.com/

and do a search for Galloway then watch the Sky news piece.

Long live resitance to oppression.