Show Us the Shekels, Richard

Galloway debates Richard Perle on Abu Dhabi TV (clip 1080):

George Galloway: Now even amongst the crazed Zionist Crusader fundamentalists who got us into this war, Richard Perle is an extremist. In fact, most of the neo-con Zionists who talked Bush into this war have now begun to admit that this has been a terrible catastrophic mistake. Unfortunately, it is not their blood, which has been shed. It has been the blood of entirely innocent people, whose lives have been destroyed.

So nobody serious, outside the lunatic asylum of Richard Perle’s circle, any longer believes that the invasion of an Arab Muslim country by hundreds of thousands of Crusading soldiers has done anything to make the world a more peaceful place.

And that’s why Bush, in November, will pay a very high political price, and Mr. Blair will be out within a few weeks. I assure you, anyone who studies the politics in London knows that Mr. Blair is in his last days in Downing Street. And when they come to write his obituary – the word Iraq will be engraved at its heart. […]

In Iran, 17 million people voted for the President, Ahmadinejad, and ten million voted for his opponent Rafsanjani. Those 27 million are determined to exercise their right to nuclear power. The response of Bush and Perle is to threaten them with invasion.

These are the people who murdered Salvador Allende, the elected president of Chile. These are the people who have overthrown elected governments all over the world, and he come on your program to prattle about democracy. These people don’t want democracy, they want slave governments. If it’s a slave dictatorship – that’s fine. If it’s a slave elected government – that’s also fine. The only thing that matters is that the government is a slave government. That’s why they will never invade Egypt. They will never invade Saudi Arabia. They only invade countries or threaten to invade countries, who stand against them and who refuse to be slaves to them. That’s why they hated Iraq, that’s why they hate Iran, that’s why they hate Syria.

Of all the faults of all the three regimes in these three countries – they were never slaves to the United States, and that’s why they were attacked. […]

Richard Perle: Let me just say, having listened to George Galloway, that I am not going to insult the intelligence or waste the time of an audience that has tuned to this channel in the hope that they will hear an interesting discussion, by responding to his ad hominem and scurrilous personal attacks. This is what he’s good at. It’s a talent from the gutter, and I’m not going to engage in this.

George Galloway: Show us the shekels.

Richard Perle: I’m not going to engage in it.

George Galloway: Show us the shekels, Richard.

Richard Perle: Needless to say… what he’s had to say deserves no serious comment, and so I’m not going to make any comment about his personal attacks.

But I do find ironic his comment on the absence of democracy in the Muslim world, when the only Arab country to have voted in a free election in living memory is the Iraq that was liberated by the United States, the United Kingdom, and a number of other countries acting in this coalition.