And Lo, Galloway Said Unto Them ...

As the debate over free speech on campus continues, George Galloway says he's pretty sure Jesus approves of what he's doing.

The National Post’s George Jonas echoes the many recent columns decrying the ease with which right-wing voices are silenced at Canada’s universities, while left-wing extremists like George Galloway are welcomed. Jonas cites the standard troubling examples, but runs off the rails when he says one of the root causes of the trouble is that “the centre-left [is] in charge of … universities.” The idea that left-wingers sympathetic to radical agendas are controlling universities is absurd. If it were true, the millions of dollars worth of military projects schools engage in would be shut down, and U of T’s Rotman School of Management would have been turned into the Galloway Centre for Israeli Apartheid Studies. A more accurate statement would have been that left-wingers dominate student societies, and that these groups do their small-minded best to make schools hostile to right-wingers. Whether this is evidence of systematic repression or a comment on the sorry state of student politics is up for debate. Jonas can take some consolation in the knowledge that student agitators quickly outgrow their militancy and go on to become corporate lawyers or writers for a national news website.

And then there’s this. Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, George Galloway displays his unparalleled ability to discredit huge sections of leftist opinion by saying perfectly reasonable things, and then covering them with his own brand of self-delusional manure. He spends most of his column making the kind of arguments that have been made in many Canadian papers: Stephen Harper is risking international alienation with his foreign policy, the Afghan mission has borne little fruit, etc. He then blows the whole thing by comparing himself to Jesus. “I am trying to bring about an end to all of this, to bring peace to the Holy Land,” he writes. “And the price of peace is justice for the Palestinians, as the Prince of Peace would surely have recognized.” Galloway is, apparently, the only person who recalls the sermon in which Jesus said, "The path to peace liest in praising tyrants, threatening to smite minor members of foreign governments, and making an ass of thyself wherever thou goest."