Controversy sells.

Imagine you are a British politician whose eloquence and wit are almost as astonishing as your pomposity, extreme beliefs, and bottomless craving for attention. Right. I know. This isn't easy. George Galloway is a unique creature. But try.

And now imagine you -- a blustering British buffoon -- will shortly deliver a series of lectures about the Middle East in Canada. You want to promote the lectures. Well, actually, you want to promote yourself, which is really all you ever do. But, technically, you want to promote the lectures.

So how will you do that?

It won't be easy. The British foreign minister would have a hard time getting the Canadian media to take notice of a lecture in Toronto, and you are decidedly not the British foreign minister. In Britain, you are notorious but trivial. Outside the extreme left, David Beckham has more political clout. So why would anyone but the fringe of the fringe in this country care what George Galloway has to say about the Middle East?

It is a puzzle. But if self-promoters know anything, it is that controversy sells.

And that, I think, explains the genesis of George Galloway being banned from Canada.

Galloway is a British citizen. He doesn't need a visa to visit or speak in Canada. He can simply fly into Pearson, stand in line, and smile at a bored customs officer who doesn't give a damn and can say so in both official languages.

But for reasons as yet unexplained, Galloway gave Canadian officials in London advance notice of his lectures. These officials obligingly said he would not be allowed to enter Canada. When Jason Kenney, the Canadian minister of immigration, refused to overturn the ban and made it clear, through his spokesman, that he is delighted by the opportunity to give the Scottish blowhard a poke in the ribs, the story began.

The decision is "idiotic," Galloway roared. It is "irrational, inexplicable, and an affront to Canada's good name." Hoist a sail and the man's gusts of indignation could send him across the Atlantic.

We all know George Galloway is appalled because he said so, over and over, to the countless Canadian reporters who have been calling to speak with a windbag they probably couldn't have picked out of a police lineup last week. Galloway is looking even more pleased with himself than usual. That is probably not a coincidence.
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With the storm building, Jason Kenney hunkered down. He didn't make the decision, he emphasized. And besides, "it has nothing to do about speech, it has everything to do with actions. It's not about words, it's about deeds. It's not about his opinions, it's about his financial, material support for an illegal terrorist organization."

Kenney is telling the truth, at least in the narrow, technically correct fashion that satisfies lawyers and nobody else.

Galloway led a convoy to deliver supplies to the elected government of Gaza. That government is Hamas. In addition to governing badly, Hamas occupies its time by killing Israelis, soldiers and civilians alike, and is thus a banned terrorist organization in this country.

So did Galloway give material aid to terrorists? Probably. Technically. Sort of. But it helps to know that Galloway -- a man who won't get out of bed if a TV camera isn't pointed his way -- led his convoy in a blaze of publicity. That is not the typical modus operandi of terrorist-supporters. Nor were the contents of the convoy -- clothes, blankets, medicine, toys, diapers, ambulances, and a fire engine -- typical terrorist fare.

This may explain why the government of the United States permitted Galloway to conduct a speaking tour in the U.S. There are, as yet, no reports of George Galloway snatching babies, passing the hat for Osama bin Laden, or otherwise endangering Americans as he travels about the United States -- which suggests his visit to this country would amount to something less than an existential threat.

Of course there may be more to this than we have been told. But until we hear more -- "national security" so often amounts to "trust us" and I'd rather not, thank you -- it looks like a classic example of literalist bureaucrats making a silly decision. It is precisely for such instances that ministers hold discretionary powers.

But, instead of exercising his authority, Kenney played the fool and denounced Galloway, through a spokesman, as an "infandous street-corner Cromwell." Such wit. I'm sure the minister and his aide had many a chuckle as they trolled the OED for zingers.

Of course, it's true, as Kenney and others have argued, that George Galloway is a foreigner who has no right to enter Canada and thus no right to speak here.
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But it does not follow that free speech is irrelevant because the right of speech is not the speaker's alone. It also belongs to the audience. By barring Galloway, the government has barred Canadians from sitting in a hall and engaging the man.

Worse than that, Kenney has made an elementary mistake.

In a modern, democratic society, banning words, images, or people creates controversy. Controversy attracts attention. Attention promotes the banned words, images, or people.

Censorship doesn't merely fail. It promotes what it targets.

This elementary fact has played out time after time, but still people don't get it.

When incensed Muslims dragged Ezra Levant before a human rights commission for publishing the famous (or infamous) Danish cartoons, they did wonders for the profile of a self-promoting journalist. When a different bunch of incensed Muslims did the same to Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn, they gave Steyn's screed the sort of publicity publishers secretly fantasize about -- which explains why Steyn's American edition sprouted a "Soon To Be Banned In Canada!" label.

If Jason Kenney had exercised his discretion and permitted George Galloway to enter Canada, Galloway would have come, spoken to a few small audiences, and left. Very few of us would have heard a whisper about it. (And if he had passed the hat for terrorists? He would be arrested. Which is preferable, one would think, to allowing a terrorist fundraiser to continue his business elsewhere.)

But Kenney didn't exercise his discretion. Instead, he played the role usually reserved for incensed Muslims -- a nice irony, that -- and delivered the mantle of martyrdom along with millions of dollars worth of free publicity to yet another self-promoting blowhard.

Controversy sells. Self-promoters like Galloway, Steyn, and Levant -- who are triplets separated at birth, I sometimes think -- know that in their bones.

If only others would learn the same lesson, we could deny the blowhards what they most desire.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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