British MP George Galloway Barred From Canada

We print below a March 21 Partisan Defense Committee letter to Jason Kenney, federal minister of citizenship and immigration, protesting the government’s banning of George Galloway. A well-known defender of the Palestinian people in the face of Zionist terror and occupation, Galloway had been invited to speak at meetings in the Toronto area, Ottawa and Montreal. Unsuccessful in overturning this outrageous ban, he addressed the meetings via video link from New York. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste.

We protest your refusal to allow British MP George Galloway to enter Canada and the outrageous allegations that he represents a threat to national security and supports “terrorist organizations.” His real “crimes” in the eyes of the Canadian government are his opposition to NATO’s bloody war of occupation in Afghanistan and his leadership of a convoy of British vehicles which carried food and other aid to the Palestinian Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the Israeli government’s bloody invasion.

The banning of George Galloway is the latest chapter in the Canadian government’s attacks on those who defend the Palestinian people against Zionist terror. In February, you targeted CUPE Ontario’s president Sid Ryan because of his pro-Palestinian stance. This month, for the same reason, you attacked student organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week and vindictively cut funding to the Canadian Arab Federation’s English-language programs for new immigrants.

These actions mark a broadening of the vicious “war on terror” which targets particularly Muslims for state repression. Tamil organizations, too, have been banned as “terrorist.” In reality, the “war on terror” is not a “war” at all, but a political pretext to drastically expand state repression and ever-more sharply curtail the democratic rights of everyone.

We stand with millions of workers and others around the world in defense of the Palestinians and all oppressed peoples in their struggles for national and social justice. Down with the ban on George Galloway! Down with the racist “war on terror”!