"I want to tell you that something in Scotland yesterday made Tony Blair very annoyed indeed. It was when people said in front of him 'Maggi! Maggi! Out! Out!'. Tony Blair is running a war which is worse than anything Maggi Thatcher ever ran...

What I saw and what you saw on television last night, it was not a war, it was a massacre, it was barbarity. It was the most powerful country in the world that spends half the worlds military budget, smashing it to the ground a great city and ancient civilisation. It was a crime, an enormous crime...

What wasn't shown on the BBC: Slaughter of the innocent

I warn Tony Blair and Jack Straw that we will do everything we can to put them in front of the International Criminal Court, that's where they ought to be. What they are doing is criminal."

He then drew parallels between the the soldiers invading Iraq and those occupying Palestine:

"My answer to 'our boys' [soldiers] is that the best thing they can do for themselves and for the world is stop this stupid war... I would say to the Jewish people that some of the bravest young men in the world are those that have refused to obey orders to occupy the West Bank..."

"The problem in the Middle East is not Iraq as they want you to believe - it is Israel, and Israels war against the Palestinian people. It is the tragedy of Palestine, still unresolved, that is the real issue...

They say they are looking for weapons of mass destruction. To them we say look in Israel!

Bush and Blair say they are punishing Iraq for breaching United Nations resolutions, to them we say what about Israel?

Bush and Blair say Iraq has possible links with international terrorism. To them we say go to Israel to see actual state terrorism.

Bush has a list of rogue states that he wants to tackle, but he's missed out the one rogue state which occupies other peoples land and has weapons of mass destruction - Israel!

Freedom for Palestine

Today as a Palestinian I fear for my compatriots under Sharons yoke. He intends to liquidate the Palestine problem under the cover of the war on Iraq. That means more killings, eighty Palestinians killed last month, eighty more already killed this month, more oppression, more starvation, more homelessness, more theft of Palestinian land and now something else - expulsions and ethnic cleansing. And against this Israeli onslaught what does Bush and Blair offer? The Middle East road map - too little, too late."

She stressed the importance of attending these rallies and not staying silent:

"If we work together, we fight together we can win. And remember, in case you feel helpless, silence is complicity, inaction is complicity. Let everyone who cares for morality, humanity and justice now stand up and be counted!"

He talked about the restrictions placed on the press to prevent them from reporting the truth:

"Yesterday the owner of a hundred and thirty newspapers in Britain published a statement in his newspapers, a statement saying that during the war press freedom would be suspended, your right to know would be removed, no criticism of this war would be tolerated!

In the US George Cloony, Meryl Streep, Jim Carey and Will Smythe have all been banned from making antiwar statements at tomorrow nights Oscars. And across the world pop songs are banned from radio and artists are black listed for wearing t-shirts against this illegal and immoral war.

This is what they mean by their new world order - they remove your human rights in the name of freedom. And they do it because they dont want you to know the truth, the truth that this war is illegal, its immoral... They dont want you to know that the reality of precision bombing and surgical strikes it that a hospital is hit and two missiles land in Iran. And they dont want you to know the truth that the coalition of the willing is really the coalition of those that have been bribed and threatened in to supporting the United States. But most of all they dont want you to know that today across the world millions of people are marching and acting not just for peace, not just against war, but for a better world...

He made it clear that antiwar doesn't mean pro-Saddam:

People shouldn't mistake our opposition to war as support for Saddam. We need no lectures, because we were marching and demonstrating on the streets when he killed workers in Iraq, when he gassed the Kurds. And we were there when the US and UK governments were busy financing and arming his regime, protesting against him."

And he didn't forget the Palestinians:

"... Imagine a world where there was real justice and freedom for the Palestinian people. Now that would be a war that would be worth fighting.

Palestinian flags - the most popular flag of the rally

Our message today is simple - there can be no peace until there is justice and we will continue to fight for justice... and a better world."

"Let no one be fooled - no one is a friend of Saddam Hussein and no one is oblivious to his crimes and human rights abuses, but how can we forget that if it weren't for the American, British and Western governments the Iraqi people would have disposed of him a long time ago!

Amongst the brutal crimes of Saddam is that his victims family have to pay for the bullet with which their loved ones were killed. Now that the US government has stated that most of Iraqs oil revenues will be used to pay for the reconstruction of the country after this catastrophic aggression. I surely cannot see the difference between the two, nor tell who is the better of the two monsters."

"I am speaking as a teacher, as a teacher I extend my solidarity to the teachers of Iraq and the children of Iraq. Our union has sent out advice for teachers in the UK about how to deal with the problems faced by our pupils because of this war. This is welcomed. But I cannot even begin to imagine the problems faced by Iraqi teachers when trying to explain to their pupils what is happening and why their country is being targeted.

To the teachers of Iraq I can only express my deep shame at being in any way associated with this merciless attack on your country.

I ask this government and Tony Blair how can we teach our children to tell the truth when this government disguises brutality as liberation?

How can we teach children to care for others when this government is prepared to spend three and a half billion pounds to prosecute their war when all over the world people are dying of starvation and we stand by and do nothing?

Greed Kills - Stop The War

How can we teach our pupils to be fair to one another when one state occupies and brutalises its neighbour Palestine and its given a million dollars a day in aid while another is simply judged to have failed to have complied with United Nations resolutions and the whole might of the US army is unleashed on it?

How can we teach them democracy and respecting other peoples point of view when this government is prepared to ignore the views of the majority of its own people and the majority of the nations of the world?

How can we teach them that bullying is wrong when they see our government supporting the biggest, wealthiest and strongest country in the world as it lays in to one of the weakest?"

Speaking as an Iraqi and as a doctor she condemned the war and talked of the existing sanctions against Iraq:

"They[Iraqi people] are already dying, their children are dying in front of them and as a doctor I am helpless in giving any medicine because UN sanctions will not allow, and now they want us to die from bombing... where is the justice in that?"

War on children

A spoof of the Star Wars film posters
START WARS - Gulf Wars Episode 2

[click to see another spoof poster]

These and similar spoof posters are available for sale from
Stop The War Coalition website.

The attack on Iraq:

"One of the richest countries of the world is now attacking on of the poorest... We are committing an act of barbarism...We launched a thousand cruise missiles on Baghdad last night. Just imagine what that would be like if it was aimed at London. Just imagine if you were sitting in London... If you saw the weapons coming day after day... This is what we are raining on people in a country where nearly half the population is under the age of sixteen. This is like bombing a playground. And this is being done in our name.

"...this is being done in our name"

About the demonstrations:

We are going to continue to demonstrate, as long as it takes... and remember we are the many, they are the few. They have the tanks, we have the people."

He started with an attack on the extreme bias of the BBC:

"My first words I want to address to the BBC, I want them to remember that they are supposed to be the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation, not a Bush Broadcasting Corporation. Not the Blair Broadcasting Corporation! It is we the people who pay their wages by our licence fees. I am tired of being marginalised and trivialised when we speak for the majority of the British people..."

Then he blasted Blairs false patriotism:

"Mr Blair says that now the bugles have blown we must all fall in to line. Well we say that the idea of my country right or wrong belongs in the 19th century with the gun boat diplomacy that he is deploying. That is the false patriotism which is the last refuge of the scoundrel. We will support our country when it is right and we will oppose our country when it is wrong! And we dont question the bravery of our young men and women in the gulf today, we say they are lions led by donkeys!"

On the lies being told about the Iraqi people:

"...debunked in the last 72 hours is the racist nonsense that alone of all the people of the world, the Iraqi people were just waiting for foreigners to kill them in order to free them! Because the Iraqi people are resisting in every town and city in Iraq, and many of them have now given there lives to defend their country."

"Dead Iraqis Can't Vote"
- a simple rebuttal to US claiming to bomb Iraq
in order to bring democracy

On stability and order:

"Mr Blair said in his address that he wants to create a world of order and stability. Well let me tell him that a thousand cruise missiles at a million dollars a throw, a billion dollars of death and destruction, has set off an earthquake through out the world and especially the Arab and Muslim world. That order and stability is the very last thing which he has created. Ten thousand new Bin Ladens have been born as a result of that earthquake!"

He closed by sharing a lesson from the past:

" Now let in close with the words uttered by the last British military commander to occupy Baghdad, General Maud in 1917 entered Baghdad and said, and I quote directly from the history books, he said 'we come not as conquerors but as liberators'. Within three years thousands of people including thousands of British people including himself were dead in Iraq as the Iraqi people using sticks and stones rose against the invaders. And the Iraqi people drove out the last foreign occupiers of their country and they'll drive out, God willing, this [..army]."

"I seem to remember being told by Tony Blair and Jack Straw last September and last October that there was no question that Britain would go to war without there being a moral, ethical, legal and United Nations basis for it. Well Tony, there is no moral basis for bombing Baghdad and Basra, there is no legal authority - you didn't even put a resolution to the UN because you knew that despite all the bribery, and all the money that was offered over the past few months not one country in the world other than Britain and the United States was prepared to vote for war!"

A play on words - a tribute to the French not caving in to US bullying