THE AI AFFRAY | Day 198 | Hoax or end time? | Iran ultimatum | Macklemore dumped | Free Palestine

George Galloway (0:00)

Welcome to the mother of all talk shows, coming to you live from Johannesburg, in the Republic of South Africa, where I spent some of the best and happiest days of my life. Under apartheid, I'll explain the conundrum later. And things have got so bad for Saudi Arabia, they've appealed to Andy Burnham for help. God help them.

Donald Trump has had a secret meeting with Ansar Allah, the people's movement in Yemen, and made a secret side deal with them. American power in protection of its satrapies in the Gulf, has begun to deteriorate to the point of non-existence. British politics too. There's a by-election in London, on which I have something to say. So stay tuned. It's the mother of all talk shows.

SPEAKER_2 (1:01)

You are listening to the mother of all talk shows podcast with George Galloway.

George Galloway (1:10)

I'm one of the very few people who could call themselves a socialist, a member of the labor movement who spent time undercover in apartheid South Africa, on behalf of the London Cell of the African National Congress. And it's one of my proudest achievements. I did eventually have to give some blood from my nose only in Guguletu Township Police Station, at the hands of a Scottish policeman called Campbell. I've hated the Campbells all of my life, from the MacDonald Massacre of Glentow and the Massacre of George Galloway's nose in the Guguletu Police Station. But the missions that I undertook, undercover, were missions that were easy for a white Britisher to undertake, but perilous indeed for black South Africans and brown South Africans and Jewish South Africans. I'll explain more later. I am here on a very extended tour. I'm speaking just about everywhere in the country. Not about the salad days of my youth, but about the dreadful days being experienced still daily by the Palestinian people. But undoubtedly, once I've done that, people like to ask me to make comparisons between Apartheid South Africa and Apartheid Israel. And I'm going to shock you perhaps when I say that evil and pernicious as Apartheid South Africa was, Apartheid Israel is way, way worse. The key difference being that the South African ruling regime needed the black South Africans as a labor force, as a market, as many of the very successful mass boycott campaigns in the 80s in particular established. White capitalism in South Africa simply didn't work if the black South Africans didn't play ball. So that's the key difference. In Palestine, the settlers, the white European colonialists have no need whatsoever and no wish whatsoever to have a single Palestinian left on their land. They don't want them as workers. They don't want them as consumers. They wish them to disappear. And over eight decades, they have made one hell of a lot of them disappear, particularly in this last three years, where an actual genocide as opposed to a low-level mass killing. Over decades, we had the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of people. As an encouragement to the others to leave, basically the Israeli message was leave or die. The Palestinians, having resisted all of these decades, are not prepared to leave and therefore many, many, many of them were killed. So, that key difference is what motivated the grandson of Nelson Mandela to publicly state that the situation of the Palestinians is much worse than the situation of the majority communities in South Africa during apartheid. Now, I want to reflect on something that my good friend, Yvonne Ridley, who is my co-speaker on this Palestine tour, just said this very day at a packed, packed rally. I hope you get to see the footage of it. A packed rally. She went all the way back to the early 80s and the Duns supermarket workers in the great city of Dublin in the great Republic of Ireland. And it's not that I had forgotten the story, but it hadn't been refreshed for a very long time. And Yvonne put it this way.

Sometimes you say from an acorn, a great oak arises from two grapefruits in a supermarket in Dublin grew a worldwide global boycott of South African goods, where no self-respecting person would be found partaking of anything from apartheid South Africa. A woman in the store bought two South African grapefruits. And when she came to the till, a young woman, checkout girl, said no. One word. No. Just like Rosa Parks says, no. When she was told she had to go and sit at the back of the bus. The checkout girl said, no, I'm not going to serve you. My trade union and greetings to the trade union congress in Britain, by the way, who are recording massive new recruitment numbers. And I congratulate them for that. Her trade union, she said, had told her that they were not to handle goods from apartheid South Africa. So she could not pick up these two grapefruits and scan them at the till. Well, history doesn't record the attitude of the customer, but it does record the attitude of DUNS, D-U-N-N-E-S. They sacked the girl, and ten of her co-workers walked out the door on strike to defend her. And they were on strike for two years and nine months before winning a great victory. And in that two years and nine months, they became so famous that Nelson Mandela himself declared from his cell on Robben Island near Cape Town that he had heard the story and that it had made his heart fly sore like a bird. These young women in Dublin, wow, they make you proud to be, in my case, part Irish. It was a stand for what's right. Why do I label the point? Well, that's exactly what we need to be doing in relation to Apartheid Israel. The hammer of the Palestinian resistance needs an anvil of a global worldwide solidarity movement in order to make the hammer more effective and make it win. So one of the things I'm talking about tonight is whether we are, all of us, every one of us, doing everything that we should be doing in terms of that. If done supermarket checkout girls in the early 1980s can do what they did, what can you do now when you've got social media at your disposal and you can electrifyingly spread messages of boycott? This is particularly apt when we come to discuss Ed Sheeran. Now, many people sneer at Ed Sheeran, especially now. I loved his music, I'll be perfectly frank. So boycotting him is tougher for me than it is evidently for many of you. I actually fell for his nice guy act. I thought he was the boy next door, the kind of boy you'd wish would marry your daughter. But it turns out, he's a grade A coward, a grade A shit. Because when his warm-up act, the great Macklemore, said the words free Palestine, whilst warming up for the Ed Sheeran show, the entire Israel lobby descended on the proprietors of the venues that the Ed Sheeran North America tour was to be gathered in.