We deserve something better than this

 IUAFS Statement on the Exclusion of George Galloway and Chris Williamson from an Anti-Genocide Platform

At the Palestine solidarity demonstration on 20th January in Birmingham, former Labour and RESPECT MP George Galloway, and former Labour MP Chris Williamson, who are now Leader and Deputy Leader of the Workers Party respectively, were excluded from the platform, seemingly on the instructions of leading figures in the Stop the War Coalition nationally.
We in International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) condemn this sectarian and unwarranted exclusion as an attack on the democracy necessary to run an effective anti-war and anti-imperialist movement. It is a matter of great urgency to organise the broadest mass movement possible of genuine defenders of the Palestinians, and both George Galloway and Chris Williamson have had long records of outspoken defence of the Palestinians and opposition to imperialist crimes in the Middle East. 
George Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party for his outspoken opposition to the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, and for solidarising with, and calling for, Iraqi and broader Arab resistance to that terrible crime.  He has campaigned for the Palestinian cause for decades, since the 1970s, and has been brutally physically attacked and beaten by fascistic Zionists for his outspokenness. Chris Wiliamson was likewise repeatedly suspended from Labour, and barred from the constituency he won in 2017, for principled and outspoken opposition to Zionism, at the behest of the ‘Friends of Israel’ lobbyists who have captured Labour and, under Starmer, have clearly given support to genocidal attacks against Palestinian civilians including blockading food, fuel and drinking water, which have caused numerous deaths in Gaza.
We applaud the remarks of Lowkey on the Stop the War platform in Birmingham, in publicly defending George and Chris’s right to speak. There can be no justification for such exclusions: we do suspect that a good part of it was because of George and Chris’s equally outspoken defence of the people of the Donbass (the Russian-speaking Southern and Eastern region formerly in Ukraine) against the Western-armed regime in Kiev. 
That regime is dominated by those inspired by the WWII Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, and aims at ethnic cleaning and genocide against the Donbass population just as clearly as the Zionist assault on Palestinians in Gaza. This has been going on for a whole decade now, and the people of the Donbass have been resisting that criminality for the whole of that period. Firstly, with the militias of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and since February 2022 with the crucial assistance of the armed forces of the Russian Federation. This led those populations to vote to join the Russian Federation not least to defend themselves against a similar fate to Gaza. The West has tried to wage a similar slaughter – with numerous atrocities and massacres, and the provision of deadly cluster bombs and toxic depleted uranium weapons to Kiev - but is being defeated by Russia and the Donbass people.

We applaud the outspoken support of Galloway and Williamson for the Palestinians, and the people of the Donbass, and their initial efforts to organise for the latter by creating No2NATO. We were compelled to distance ourselves from No2NATO however because of mistakes made by Galloway and the Workers Party by including dangerous right-wing elements such as David Clews of the slippery far-right Unity News Network, in No2NATO events.

We withdrew our support for No2NATO because of that serious political error, and have been publicly critical of George Galloway in particular because of that attempt to build a kind of popular front with such reactionary elements. We consider that this error seriously undermined No2NATO and damaged its standing in the labour movement.
But it is clear that Galloway and Williamson, for all their flaws, are genuine and outspoken defenders of the Palestinians, and excluding them from platforms of the solidarity movement is wrong in principle. Given the Russophobic politics of many involved in STW these exclusions are as likely to be driven by hostility to the strong side of Galloway/Williamson’s politics as their mistakes. In any case, all these questions should be debated out in an inclusive and democratic anti-imperialist, anti-war movement, which can only be harmed by bureaucratic exclusions. We all deserve something better than this.