LEFTIES TALK ABOUT LONDON ATTACKS

George Galloway on the price of blood:

What our leaders want is liberty for us, but only up to a point, and they're ready to take that away if it suits them, but no liberty for anybody else. And the people in the Muslim world can see it very clearly. They know that nobody gave a toss about the thousands who were killed in Fallujah. Nobody in the British Parliament raised any qualm about the American armed forces reducing Fallujah to ash and killing thousands of people. Yet, they go into the kind of emoting that we saw yesterday about the deaths in London.

I'm different from that, and most British people are different from that, when you reach them. The blood of everyone is worth the same. God didn't differentiate between a dead person in London killed by sheets of flying glass and red-hot razor sharp steel and someone who died the same death in Baghdad. These deaths are the same. And war of the kind that we have seen -- unjustified, illegal, based on lies, in Iraq, is terrorism of a different kind. Just because the President, who ordered it is wearing a smart suit rather than the garb of an Islamist in the Tora Bora doesn't make their orders more legitimate than orders if they were given from bin Laden.

So tell us, George, who are you taking orders from?

In the same interview, George Monbiot on the cost of terrorism:

As far as its impact on Britain is concerned, I am worried that we are going to see the loss of certain civil liberties as a result of this. We have seen with, for example, the PATRIOT Act in the United States, that there has been quite a curtailment of some fairly basic human rights, including the right to free assembly and the right to free expression and, of course, there has been a great deal of very intrusive surveillance and policing of the Muslim community and indeed parts of the non-white community in general in the U.S., some of which appears to have very little to do with anything which could reasonably be regarded as dealing with terrorism. And I'm concerned that that's going to come over here. I'm concerned that the draconian restrictions on protest that we already have in this country could be extended. Already we have seen several people saying that this provides justification for the introduction of a new identity card in Britain. We don't yet have an identity card, but they're talking about an identity card which includes biometric identification, and plenty more besides, which could turn into quite an oppressive state tool if we're not careful.

The left's always raving on about lost freedoms in the US but specifics are never offered. Perhaps Monbiot should be more concerned that the average Briton's image is captured 300 times by surveillance cameras every day.

Update: My thanks to Tim Blair for the link. For those interested in the slowly emerging picture of the Saddam Hussein - al Qaeda connection, go here (it's via Democratic Underground, oddly enough).