Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Last Saturday in London, the person known to many as "George Galloway" taunted the British Government with the following public statement: "I am here, I am here, I am here to glorify the Lebanese resistance [shouts of 'Allah Akbar' from the crowd]. To glorify the leaders of the Lebanese resistance, Hizbollah. I am here to glorify their leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah."

This is the same "George Galloway" who managed to infiltrate the House of Commons last year as a Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, and the identical "George Galloway" who made an appearance this year on Channel Four's Celebrity Big Brother show where he pretended to be a cat. It is the very same "George Galloway" who enjoys a public platform at the Guardian newspaper where he attempts to persuade readers that his benefactor Saddam Hussein was not such a bad man after all. Now, Rainy Day is able to reveal that the multifarious being posing as "George Galloway" has established a foothold in the inner sanctum of American letters, The New York Review of Books, using a cunning nom de plume. Here, we present an example of his recent "writing":

The most flagrant and widely deplored contradiction is between America's self-image as a force for democracy and human rights and a reality in which many rights at home are sharply limited, the death penalty continues along with the torture of "enemy combatants," while the US repudiates the international laws of war. Abroad, the US support of dictators and its failure to protect victims of genocide in Rwanda and Darfur have contributed greatly to anti-Americanism. Foreigners can observe for themselves, on the one hand, the weakness of public services throughout the US, the cult of low taxes, and the distrust of any redistributive role for government and, on the other hand, the formidable apparatus of American military and intelligence services throughout the world and in the US itself. The strength of America's destructive power and the lack of American interest in nation-building and development abroad have become all too evident.

At this point, Rainy Day readers will be straining at the leash, overcome with curiosity, as to what pseudonym "George Galloway" is using. Hint: the wickedly clever anagram is "A False Font Hymn", which includes a reference to the entire Galloway subterfuge (false), an appropriate printing term (font) and a homophone (hymn) that alludes to him. Too Dan Brownish? OK, here it is: Stanley Hoffmann. Simple, but very wily, nonetheless.