The news that British MP George Galloway was the planned guest speaker at a February 1st Hamas fundraiser at Boston’s Palestinian Cultural Center for Peace would, in a morally coherent world, be alarming for those in the West who wonder why elected officials should be gathering support for a group of jihadist thugs whose principal efforts are dedicated to the extirpation of Israel and the murder of Jews.  Here, again, is yet another instance of the dangerous “unholy alliance” between Islamists, with a specific agenda to dilute Western institutions and destroy Israel, and Leftists, who, in accommodating radical Islam, not only enable what Robert Spencer has called a “stealth jihad,” but help facilitate it.

Galloway, who wry commentator Christopher Hitchens once observed as “being 100 percent consistent in support for thugs and criminals,” has been actively raising funds for his current pet project, Viva Palestina—including from those attendees at the Boston event, who will pay $1000 each to attend a private reception with the MP.  Viva Palestina’s purported goal is to shuttle in “aid” to Gaza, but that assistance has been in the form of cash given directly to Hamas—designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department, Canada, and the EU.

Galloway’s pernicious fundraising road show has also included visits to American universities.  In October 2009, for instance, in an action that seemed to give credence to notion that there was, and remains, a sinister and dangerous side to anti-Israel activism on college campuses, the U.S. Justice Department initiated an investigation into possible illegal fundraising on behalf of Hamas participated in by UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union.  Based on a formal complaint by the Zionist Organization of America, the investigation will look into allegations that Galloway had raised funds for the Viva Palestina project.

Galloway, who has referred Hamas “as heroes [who] are opening the eyes of the world to the siege in the Strip,” and who elevates the Palestinian cause as a sacred mission against the tyranny of Western imperialism, had attended a May 2009 event on the Irvine campus sponsored by the University’s Muslim Student Union, “Israel: The Politics of Genocide” and used the opportunity not only to condemn Israel for its many alleged transgressions, but also to raise money to assist its enemies in arming themselves to further their ambition of extirpating the Jewish state.  His real intention, and the spurious purpose of Viva Palestina’s fundraising, was on full display in 2009 when Galloway presented a satchel of cash to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.  At that meeting, Galloway was very clear about his true intentions and the purpose of his charitable activities:  “This is not charity,” he said as he defiantly passed the money to Haniyeh, “this is politics.”  What is more, he contended at that meeting, he was fully intent on “break[ing] the sanctions on the elected government of Palestine.”

While Galloway’s current obsession seems to be his visceral hatred for the Jewish state and adulation for its jihadist foes, his loathing of the imperialist West in general has been evident for some time now.  In a 2005 interview on Iraq News Network, for instance, Galloway was asked if it was feasible, or even productive, for the radical Left and Islamists to have common goals in their assault against Western democracies and Israel.  For Galloway, whose fatuous theories about Western hegemony and Third-World victimism animate his venomous world view, this unholy alliance is precisely what he is after.  “Not only do I think it's possible,” he told the interviewer, “but I think it is vitally necessary and I think it is happening already.  It is possible because the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies.  Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries, mainly Muslim countries.  They have the same interest in opposing savage capitalist globalization which is intent upon homogenizing the entire world . . .  So it's necessary to unite these two great forces.”

That morally reprehensible fawning over despots and murderers has been part of Galloway’s repertoire for years.  In 1994, for example, he told the lovely Saddam Hussein, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”  What was more, Galloway was completely willing to cheer on the Islamist madman in his apocalyptic scourge against mankind, and specifically against one small democracy in the Middle East.  “I want you to know,” he told Hussein, “that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem.”  On an Al Jazeera television appearance in 2005, Galloway similarly showed his contempt for the West and his strange attraction to jihadism when he accused the United States and Israel of being defiling occupiers who had unjustly asserted themselves into Iraq and Palestine.  “Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners―Jerusalem and Baghdad,” he said. “The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will.  The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent.  Some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. . . .”

The perverse union between jihadists and Leftists, embodied by Galloway, which might seem initially incompatible, serves both sides well, and is the reason why his presence at the Palestinian Center makes strategic sense.  Pro-Palestinians wish to deflect the pathologies of their own societies and savor being able to assign the term of illegal “occupier” to Israel, and Leftists at the same time fulfill their Marxist dreams of trying to envision, and help create, what Harvard’s Ruth Wisse has called the “ideal of the egalitarian state,” by purporting to help suffering Gazans with aid that instead is expropriated by Hamas for weaponry with which to murder even more Jews.