So Galloway was running a “charity”, which was not registered, and did not have to disclose where it’s money came from. The Mariam Appeal was supposedly for this Iraqi girl who became ill from DU. And Galloway attended the Great Britain Iraq Society, who had among it’s first attendees, none other than Scott “the pervert” Ritter. HMMMMMM!
DU, starving Iraqi children, and Ritter, the plot here is getting pretty thick! Of course, it must be a conspiracy, because we are all being framed by the government. Or, they were blackmailing Scottie boy, after discovering his taste for underage young things. Who knows? That giant sucking sound you hear is some of the credibility of the Saddam apologists going down the toilet.
How a sick girl became a puppet for politics
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
(Filed: 23/04/2003)
George Galloway pursued his campaign on behalf of Saddam Hussein through a succession of organisations. The best-known was the Mariam Appeal, set up in 1998 and named after a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukaemia who was brought to Britain for treatment.
Three years ago, he hosted the inaugural meeting of the Great Britain Iraq Society in the Grand Committee room of the House of Commons.
Mr Galloway has also been closely involved with the Iraq-Britain Friendship Society and the Emergency Committee in Iraq.
The principal aim of all these groups was to engineer the international rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein and end United Nations sanctions against Iraq.
Who funded them? Until yesterday, Mr Galloway had been unwilling to give any details about the Mariam Appeal.
But after The Daily Telegraph’s disclosures of documents pointing to Iraqi payments, he claimed most of the money had come from the United Arab Emirates, some from Saudi Arabia and the balance from a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zureikat.
The Mariam Appeal was not a registered charity and so was not obliged under charities law to publish accounts. As a result, there is no means of knowing whether Saddam Hussein was a donor, as the documents found in Baghdad appear to indicate.
Mr Galloway promoted the appeal by claiming that uranium-tipped weapons used by the allies in the first Gulf war caused the child’s leukaemia. It set a target of £100,000 - half for treating Mariam, with the rest for medicines and medical supplies for other children in Iraq.
He wrote to donors: “Little Mariam Hamza has come to symbolise the suffering children of Iraq. Please give as generously as you can.”
But although money was raised for Mariam to be successfully treated at hospitals in Glasgow and America, the appeal launched in her name became profoundly political, as Mr Galloway acknowledged yesterday.
He called it a “campaign involved in the life-or-death struggle against the might of the British and American state” - which may surprise those who thought they were donating money to help a sick little girl.
In the event, the Mariam Appeal became a vehicle both for opposing sanctions and waging a propaganda campaign against Israel.
According to Mr Galloway, it had funds of about £1 million, which he used to fund a succession of overseas trips. Between September 1999 and January 2002 he made 14 trips paid for by the Mariam Appeal, including one by double-decker bus visiting 11 countries in two months.
The appeal also met the flight costs and hotel bills for visits to Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Lebanon, Hungary, Belgium, New York and Romania, many to attend anti-sanctions conferences.
In November 2000, Mr Galloway - on the pretext of attending a religious conference - flew from a private airfield in Kent via Bulgaria to Baghdad to break the air embargo of Iraq. The Government later said the subterfuge was unnecessary and denied trying to block the flight, again paid for by the Mariam Appeal.
The Mariam Appeal no longer exists. Its website has been taken over and the telephone number for its London headquarters no longer works.
More recently, Mr Galloway’s travels have been sponsored by the Great Britain Iraq Society (GBIS), which he set up in June 2000 at the House of Commons with an inaugural meeting attended by, among others, Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector.
The GBIS promised to “circulate a newsletter, publish material, organise events, exchange visits, organise trade missions . . . and strive to restore the formerly friendly relationship between Great Britain and Iraq”.
It was described as “a society dedicated to working for better understanding, reconciliation and peace between the peoples of Iraq and Great Britain . . . a non-political society in that it eschews direct political action”.
In his capacity as chairman of GBIS, Mr Galloway last year visited Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Ukraine. It is not known who funded the society, which also paid for visits by at least two Labour backbenchers to Iraq.
In fact, since this first meeting, the society appears not to have existed other than in name. It has no telephone number listed anywhere in Britain, no internet website and appears to have no staff or membership records.
Like a great deal about Mr Galloway, it is shrouded in mystery.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/23/wmari23.xml