Writing in the Daily Telegraph’s blog, Peter Oborne, the Telegraph’s chief political commentator, says:

Last Friday evening [29 August] a British MP suffered a vicious assault on a London street. George Galloway, a 61-year-old, six-times-elected politician was beaten up for three minutes by a brutal and determined assailant in broad daylight, and was admitted to hospital as a result.

There are grounds for assuming that the motive was political, and the assault occurred due to Galloway’s criticism of Israeli actions in the Middle East. The assailant was reportedly shouting comparing Galloway to Hitler, and shouting about the holocaust.

There is something very disturbing about the response to this event by the mainstream British political establishment. Mr Galloway has received no public message of sympathy from a single MP from any party – nothing from Speaker Bercow, from the prime minister, or from any of the other elected political leader.

I know that Mr Galloway is a very controversial figure and that many people, for honourable reasons, disagree very strongly with his views. Yet that is irrelevant. The attack on Mr Galloway is beyond doubt an attack on British democracy itself.

It is a basic principle of our political culture that men and women must be able to speak up for the causes they believe in without threats or violent reappraisal…

Had an MP been attacked by some pro-Palestinian fanatic for his support of Israel, I guess there would have been a national outcry and rightly so. Why then the silence from the mainstream establishment following this latest outrageous assault on a British politician?

But it’s not just the British politicians who, through their silence over the attack on Galloway, are complicit in the destruction of British democracy on behalf of Israel.

The media, and in particular Britain’s state-owned public broadcaster, the BBC, are just as guilty. As the journalist Jonathan Cook says on his Facebook page:

British MP George Galloway was seriously assaulted on a London street a few days ago by a fanatical supporter of Israel and its army. The British media and political class have evinced almost zero interest in this incident, despite its being a rare and worrying attack on the very foundations of a democratic polity. Perversely, we have to turn to [the Russian English-language TV channel] RT to learn from Galloway what happened. This is an interview that should have been on the BBC or Channel 4.