International solidarity

The BBC, in their edited highlights of the debate in New York, carried Galloway's remark that America 'might one day not even be able to pick up the dead bodies in one of its most important cities a week after they've laid there.' Later the moderator, Amy Goodman, asked about 'the cost here at home, with the hurricane Katrina and the lack of response?'. Galloway picked up the point with 'you end up an apologist and a mouthpiece for those miserable, malevolent incompetents who couldn't even pick up the bodies of their own citizens in New Orleans in the aftermath of a hurricane.'

Unless I'm mistaken, the BBC did not include the core point of Hitchens' response: 'what I will not have said, is that we should go to a refugee woman in Biloxi and say to her, "Do you realize the Arabs have stolen the money that should have come for you?" And we have no right [..] to put the poor against each other in that way, and betray our internationalism.'

Similarly, we had Galloway's 'president George Bush invading Iraq in 1991', but not Hitchens' 'I'm talking about 1991, it wasn't an invasion of Iraq, it was an expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait by a coalition which included even Syria.'

It is also interesting to think about the exact meaning and implication of 'until we've rid the world of George W. Bush and Anthony Blair, once and for all'.

Reminder: transcript here.

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More on relativism here. Ceteribus Paribus, "Double langage", on Schröder and Blair, is worth reading. I have commented there.