EVER AGAIN:

Victim of Saddam makes Galloway shut up: A woman tortured in Iraq tried in vain last week to meet the MP who has praised the Baghdad dictator. (Charlotte Edwardes, 06/04/2003, Daily Telegraph)

For someone who happily consorts with a brutal dictator who has murdered people for just smiling at the wrong time, George Galloway was curiously frightened by a demure Iraqi Kurdish woman last week.

"I am very suspicious of you," George Galloway hissed down the phone to Freshta Raper, a 37-year-old exile and mother of one. "I have a gut feeling about you. What do you want to ask me?"

Mrs Raper had spent much of the week trying to catch up with the Left-wing Labour MP to discuss his anti-war pro-Saddam stance. The last 48 hours had, in particular, been frustrating as the MP assiduously avoided her efforts to speak to him.

Her strong view - like those of many Iraqi Kurds - is that the war is necessary as the only way to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein, the tyrant responsible for killing 21 members of her family in 1988 when the regime sprayed chemical weapons on Halabja, the Kurdish area in northern Iraq, killing 5,000.

Mrs Raper finally escaped Iraq in 1991 but only after suffering imprisonment, torture and rape. She has been burnt by one of Saddam's chemical bombs, and she has been anxious to tell Mr Galloway about her experiences with the dictator, whom the MP has visited eight times, once telling him: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." [...]

"I just want to ask you about Saddam Hussein's human rights record," said Mrs Raper. "As a Western politician, have you ever tried to discuss this in Iraq?"

"I don't have to answer that question," said Mr Galloway defiantly, before adding: "Don't you dare contact me again. If you go to my house again I will have you thrown out and call the police."

The line went dead as Mr Galloway hung up. Perhaps it wasn't so hard to see why Mr Galloway gets on so well with the Butcher of Baghdad.

It seems likely that, as the Iraqi people start sharing stories of just how awful life under Saddam has been, there'll be a lot of Leftists hanging up their phones. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2003 11:14 PM