• British Member of Parliament
• Admirer of Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Joseph Stalin
• Illegally reveived millions of dollars stolen from the United Nations Oil-For-Food Program, in exchange for his public denunciations of the UN sanctions against Iraq

A Member of the British Parliament since 1987, George Galloway was born into a socialist family in Dundee, Scotland in 1954. At age 13 he joined the British Labour Party, and within five years he became Secretary of the Scottish constituency of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. He was later appointed Vice Chairman of the Labour Party of his home city of Dundee.

In the mid-1970s, Galloway became deeply involved with the pro-Palestinian movement after a chance meeting with a young Palestinian who implored him for help. Shortly thereafter, Galloway visited a Palestinian refugee camp, and when he returned home he began flying the Palestinian flag over the Dundee town hall.

From 1983 to 1987, Galloway served as the General Secretary of War On Want, a Human rights NGO that works closely with the Union of Palestine Medical Relief Committees. At the time, the British newspaper Daily Mirror accused him of "living the high life at the charity's expense." Although an independent auditor cleared him of any misdoing, in 1988 Galloway admitted to having had a number of sexual liaisons while attending to overseas business for the NGO.

In 1987 Galloway was elected as a Labour Party Member of Parliament for the Glasgow Hillhead section of Scotland.

Describing himself as "being on the anti-imperialist left," Galloway ranks among the most impassioned advocates of the de facto alliance that has been forged between Western leftists and radical Islamists, unlikely allies who have joined their efforts to oppose America's war in Iraq specifically, and its larger war on terror generally.

Galloway was a great admirer of Saddam Hussein, whom he once told: "I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." More specifically, he praised Saddam for giving financial rewards to the families of deceased Palestinian suicide bombers who had lost their lives while trying to blow up Israeli civilians.

Galloway, who recalls the day that the Soviet Union fell as the worst day of his life, has said: "Just as Stalin industrialized the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq's Great Leap Forward." When Britain joined the United States in the military mission to overthrow Saddam, Galloway called for a jihad against British and American troops; he exhorted the troops themselves to disobey the "illegal" orders they had been given to fight an "illegal" war.

In October 2003 Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party because of his harsh criticisms of British policy in Iraq. He went on to establish his own party, whose acronym, RESPECT, stands for: Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environment, Community and Trade Unionism. Galloway stated that the fledgling party's purpose was to offer "an alternative to imperialist war, unfettered global capital and the rule of the market."

In February 2004 Galloway spoke out against a French ban on the wearing of the hijab (veil) by Muslim women in France, calling the ban "an attack on the right to have the freedom to practice one's chosen religion." "The banning of the hijab in France," he added, "is the flip side of the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the British Home Secretary and his draconian anti-terrorism legislation which imprisons Muslims without charge and trial -- in direct contravention of international human rights standards."

Also in 2004, it was learned that over the years Galloway had received valuable oil allocations from Saddam Hussein in exchange for the pro-Saddam, anti-West positions he (Galloway) had publicly taken with regard to the United Nations sanctions against Iraq. In all, Saddam gave Galloway approximately 20 million barrels of oil which instead should have been exported under the UN Oil-For-Food Program, whose intended purpose was to raise enough money to feed Iraqi children while the sanctions were in place. Galloway's subsequent sale of this oil ultimately earned him some $585,000 in illegal profits each year.

Galloway funneled much of this illicit cash through a pseudo-charity, the Mariam Appeal, that he himself had created in 1998. The Mariam Appeal was ostensibly an anti-sanctions campaign whose stated purpose was "to provide medicines, medical equipment and medical assistance to the people of Iraq." But a four-year inquiry by the House of Commons Select Committee on Standards and Privileges found massive amounts of incontrovertible evidence -- including bank records and Iraqi government vouchers -- that Galloway had used the money largely to enrich himself, and that, by so doing, he had greatly "damaged the reputation of the House."

A letter accompanying one Iraqi payment to Galloway -- in the amount of $3 million -- praised Galloway, "in the name of President Saddam Hussein," for "his courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq, like Blair, the British Prime Minister, and for his opposition in the House of Commons and Lords against all outrageous lies against our patient [Iraqi] people."

In July 2007, Galloway would be suspended from the House of Commons for his egregious breach of ethics.

On April 25, 2005, Galloway was interviewed by the Iraq News Network's Mohammad Basirul Haq Sinha on the subject of the war on terror. Sinha asked Galloway: "You often call for uniting Muslim and progressive forces globally. How far is it possible under current situation?" To this, Galloway replied:

"Not only do I think it's possible 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."

Galloway has characterized America's war on terror and the tactics of al Qaeda as "two sides of the same evil coin." "I will not condemn the just war of populations of occupied territories when they resist, in any way that they can, uninvited invaders on to their sovereign soil," he adds.

In August 2005 Galloway was praised by the head of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, Dr. 'Azzam Al-Tamimi, a self-described a "sympathizer and supporter" of Hamas who believes that Israel is a "Zionist, racist, and fascist State" which has no right to exist.

On September 13, 2005, Galloway launched a twelve-city speaking tour in the U.S. for the purpose of condemning America's war effort in Iraq as both illegal and immoral. The tour was sponsored jointly by the National Council of Arab Americans, the Traprock Peace Center, the International Socialist Review, and The Nation Institute. Its most notable supporter was Jane Fonda.

During the tour, Galloway condemned American support for Israel, praised antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, laid blame for the Hurricane Katrina disaster on President Bush, impugned America for having "created the swamp of radical Islam" from which the 9/11 attackers arose, blamed the Bush administration's War on Terror for creating "hundreds of thousands" of "new terrorists," and accused the U.S. of "going around the world occupying countries and stealing their things."

On September 24, 2005, Galloway spoke at the "Call to United Mass Action," an Anti-Iraq War protest rally in Washington, DC that was co-organized by International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice. Other speakers at the event, which was attended by an estimated 300,000 people, included Ramsey Clark, Cindy Sheehan, Ralph Nader, Lynne Stewart, Mahdi Bray, Dolores Huerta, Elias Rashmawi, Larry Holmes, Brian Becker, Michael Berg, Michael Shehadeh, and Al Sharpton.

In a May 2006 interview with GQ magazine, Galloway stated that the assassination of British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be "morally justified" because of Blair's active role in the Iraq War.

Three months later, on August 8, 2006, Galloway appeared on the Arabic television station Al Jazeera and likened the relationship between Blair and President Bush to the adulterous affair between Monica Lewinsky and former President Bill Clinton. The American-British relationship, Galloway said, is "the same kind of relationship that Ms. Lewinsky had with the former U.S. president. It's dishonorable, disreputable, unequal, and humiliating for a once great country to be the tail of the American dog, when the head of the dog is as crazy as Bush is."

In 2008 Galloway endorsed Illinois Senator Barack Obama for U.S. President. In a May 2008 interview that appeared on Al-Aqsa TV, Galloway declared that America had been defeated in the Iraq War, and that he prayed for Obama to be victorious in the November election so "he can shift the United States' attitude … Allah willing."

Galloway today serves as an endorser and spokesman of "Iran Watch," a campaign of the anti-war collective Peace No War, which seeks "to stop the War on Iran before it starts" -- a reference to a possible U.S. military strike aimed at destroying Iran's nuclear weapons program. Galloway's fellow endorsers of this initiative include, among others, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Professor Howard Zinn, playwright Harold Pinter, and International Action Center founder Ramsey Clark.

Galloway is the author of several books, including his 2005 autobiography I'm Not the Only One, which Nick Cohen of the New Statesman describes as being "packed with apologetics for Saddam's slaughters of Kurds, Shias, democrats and socialists." That same year, he released Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington: The Brit Who Set Congress Straight About Iraq. And in 2006 he published the Fidel Castro Handbook, a hagiography of the Cuban President he admired so greatly.