LONDON, April 4 (Kashar News): The anti-war Respect Party is calling on the people of Birmingham, central England, to support its candidate Salma Yaqoob to become the first hijab-wearing Muslim to be elected to the British Parliament.

"Can you imagine the impact it will have from Fallujah to Palestine to Kashmir to Pakistan?" said Respect leader, George Galloway, who set up the anti-war party following his expulsion from Labour over his outspoken criticism of the invasion of Iraq.

"All over the world, people will see walking into the House of Commons with her three small children and her wonderful husband, a Muslim woman in her hijab standing proud and standing up for what she believes in," he said.

Yaqoob, who chair the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition, was chosen as Respect's prospective parliamentary candidate for the city's Sparkbrook and Small Heath constituency, which has Britain's largest Muslim population.

"The very first Muslim woman to walk into the House of Commons and sit there by you, can you imagine the achievement that will be and how that will cheer people all over the world?" Galloway told a local meeting in Birmingham on Sunday.

"What a blow that will be for (Prime Minister Tony) Blair, who killed so many women who looked like her - to be haunted by her on the benches in the House of Commons. It would be a blow from which he would never recover," he said.

Yaqoob, who was born in the northern English city of Bradford but lives in Birmingham, is contesting the traditionally safe seat held by Labour MP, Roger Godsiff, with a 16,000 vote majority.

Galloway described Godsiff as having "the worst-ever" record of participating in parliamentary debates over the past century and done nothing to represent the people's interests.

People like Godsiff regard Muslim families, like Yaqoob's of Pakistan descent, as "foreigners, as 'Pakis', as 'immigrants from whom we'll soak votes if we're lucky and when it suits us we'll kick them in teeth before we stab them in the back'," he said.

At the last election in 2001, no less than six Muslim candidates contested the seat, where there is an estimated 27,000 Muslim voters.

The Liberal Democrats, which opposed the Iraq war, have also declared that they are fielding a Muslim candidate, Talib Hussain, but further nominations are expected.

Respect, which is contesting the general elections for the first time, has so far chosen candidates, including nine other Muslims, in 26 seats selected out of a total of 659 constituencies.

Galloway himself is standing in London's Bethnal Green and Bow, where he is considered to have an outside chance of ousting Labour's Black Jewish MP, Oona King, who in 2001 challenged voters to unseat her if they disagreed with her support for the Iraq war.

But as in Birmingham, the biggest disadvantage is the danger of splitting the vote among opposition parties in Bethnal Green, which has Britain's highest concentration of Bangladeshi Muslims.