Odd this day
George Galloway makes his — so far — greatest contribution to the world.
Albeit inadvertently. He had announced on the 8th, you see, that he had
Just signed a publishing deal for a children’s book series … called ‘Red Molucca the Good Pirate’
and had found his words not greeted with universal acclaim. This announcement was to be no different. His original tweet was retweeted a handful of times. This reply – although a fair few people knew, or at least suspected, that this Winnie the Pooh was not connected either to the Disney corporation or the estate of A. A. Milne – was RTed over 200 times, contributing significantly to the gaiety of nations.
Galloway had felt moved to create the works, apparently, because
rum-drinking, cut-throat, walking the plank-type characters were not the right role models
for impressionable young minds.
Enter an ethical pirate … A husband and father whose family (and dog) pirate alongside him. A kind of Robin Hood of the high seas.
Mr Galloway could write from experience about being a family man and role model, having had four wives and six children. He’s also been successful professionally, leading two political parties, Respect and the Workers Party of Britain. The fact that he founded both of them is what is known as a coincidence.
He is also a television presenter, most notably for Press TV (operated by the much-loved and democratic Iranian government), Russia Today (which broadcasts on behalf of cuddly democrat Vladimir Putin), and Al Mayadeen (linked to Iran and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who is responsible for a mere half a million deaths and the creation of almost 4m refugees).
He’s also much in demand as a pundit. Of Julian Assange’s rape charges, he observed that
Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.
And he denounced Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “in the most withering terms”. Those terms were, famously:
Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and I want you to know that we are with you.
At a public meeting in Leeds in 2014, he said of Bradford, where he was then an MP, that it was “an Israel-free zone”, which was not a vast surprise to anyone who already knew that Israel is a small nation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean sea, and Bradford is a city in Yorkshire.
He possesses a Palestinian passport, given him by Hamas, an organisation which has not so much been designated a terrorist organisation as much as shown itself to be one with its words and actions, and — at the time it gave him the document — had a charter which called for the destruction of the Middle East’s only democracy, and contained references to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, a forged document from 1903 which claims that Jewish people drink children’s blood.
In the end, he only wrote one Red Molucca book, which came out in 2021, and did not noticeably trouble the bestseller lists.
