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سيف الله
04-23-2014, 12:56 PM
Salaam

The pathetic Blair strikes again


In keynote speech on Middle East, former PM blames Islamic extremism for failures of western intervention in region

Western military intervention in the Middle East has so far failed due to the distorting impact of an Islamic extremism so opposed to modernity that it could yet engender global catastrophe, Tony Blair warned on Wednesday in a keynote speech on the state of politics in the Middle East.

With support for intervention ebbing fast, especially in Britain, Blair urges a wilfully blind west to realise it must take sides and if necessary make common cause with Russia and China in the G20 to counter the Islamic extremism that lies at the root of all failures of western intervention.

He admits there is now a desire across the west to steer clear at all costs following the bloody outcomes in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, but says the extremism still represents the biggest threat to global security in the 21st century, saying it is holding back development across Africa and the Far East.

In a speech to Bloomberg in London on Wednesday, the former Labour prime minister claimed the west was reluctant to look unflinchingly at Islamic extremism because the world of politics is uncomfortable talking about religion.

He claims: "For the last 40 to 50 years, there has been a steady stream of funding, proselytising, organising and promulgating coming out of the Middle East, pushing views of religion that are narrow minded and dangerous. Unfortunately we seem blind to the enormous global impact such teaching has had and is having.

"Within the Middle East itself, the result has been horrible, with people often facing a choice between authoritarian government that is at least religiously tolerant; and the risk that in throwing off the government they don't like, they end up with a religiously intolerant quasi-theocracy.

Insisting that the west has to take sides, he describes Islamic extremism as "not about a competing view of how society or politics should be governed within a common space where you accept other views are equally valid. It is exclusivist in nature. The ultimate goal is not a society which someone else can change after winning an election. It is a society of a fixed polity, governed by religious doctrines that are not changeable but which are, of their essence, unchangeable."

The region's chaos is not a battle between Sunni or Shia, or primarily due to the lack of economic opportunity, but due to "a common struggle around the issue of the rightful place of religion, and in particular Islam, in politics".

He argues: "There is a Titanic struggle going on within the region between those who want the region to embrace the modern world – politically, socially and economically – and those who instead want to create a politics of religious difference and exclusivity. This is the battle. This is the distorting feature. This is what makes intervention so fraught but non-intervention equally so. This is what complicates the process of political evolution. This is what makes it so hard for democracy to take root."

Failure to understand the common cause of the failure of western intervention leads to the west being baffled by the apparent failure of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, he says although he adds people may come to view the impact of those engagements differently with time, even if at present there is no appetite to do so.

He also admits Libya is a mess, destabilising neighbouring countries, and describes Syria such an unmitigated disaster that it may now be better to come to a repugnant interim deal that leaves its president, Bashar al-Assad, in power.

But his condemnation of western foreign policy in Syria is complete, saying: "We call for the regime to change in Syria, we encourage the opposition to rise up, but then when Iran activates Hezbollah on the side of Assad, we refrain even from air intervention to give the opposition a chance. The result is a country in disintegration, millions displaced, a death toll approximating that of Iraq, with no end in sight and huge risks to regional stability."

He suggests the west should once again consider no-fly zones, subject to the opposition groups not receiving support from Iran.

Aware that he is an increasingly lonely advocate of intervention, he says: "I completely understand why our people feel they have done enough, more than enough. And when they read of those we have tried to help spurning our help, criticising us, even trying to kill us, they're entitled to feel aggrieved and to say: we're out."

But in an impassioned call not to see the Middle East as a battle between two evils he says, "The important point for western opinion is that this is a struggle with two sides. So when we look at the Middle East and beyond it to Pakistan or Iran and elsewhere, it isn't just a vast unfathomable mess with no end in sight and no one worthy of our support. It is in fact a struggle in which our own strategic interests are intimately involved; where there are indeed people we should support and who, ironically, are probably in the majority if only that majority were mobilised, organised and helped.

"But what is absolutely necessary is that we first liberate ourselves from our own attitude. We have to take sides. We have to stop treating each country on the basis of whatever seems to make for the easiest life for us at any one time. We have to have an approach to the region that is coherent and sees it as a whole. And above all, we have to commit. We have to engage"

Blair caused controversy when he sided with the Egyptian military's overthrow of the democratically elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his intervention in Iraq in 2003 has been cited as one reason why the west has refused to intervene more in the three-year Syrian war.

Blair warned: "The threat of this radical Islam is not abating. It is growing. It is spreading across the world. It is destabilising communities and even nations. It is undermining the possibility of peaceful co-existence in an era of globalisation. And in the face of this threat we seem curiously reluctant to acknowledge it and powerless to counter it effectively."

In a clear reference to Saudi Arabia, he said: "It is absurd to spend billions of dollars on security arrangements and on defence to protect ourselves against the consequences of an ideology that is being advocated in the formal and informal school systems and in civic institutions of the very countries with whom we have intimate security and defence relationships."

He claimed some of these countries wanted to break out of this ideology, but needed the west to make it a core part of the international dialogue in order to force the necessary change within their own societies.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...?commentpage=6

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Scimitar
04-24-2014, 03:08 AM
he's seriously deluded, like the joker from batman - sports the same wry smile too. :D
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Muslim Woman
04-24-2014, 05:29 AM
:sl:

No, Blair. You are a liar


Posted by: Sheikh Abu Talha ANALYSIS in Europe, Latest, Politics, UK




And never think that Allah is unaware of what the wrongdoers do. He only delays them for a Day when eyes will stare [in horror]. Racing ahead, their heads raised up, their glance does not come back to them, and their hearts are empty.[1]



The great British Butcher Blair is at it again, warning the West about “Islamic extremism”. Instead of paying for his war crimes, this mass murderer is allowed to masquerade as a peace envoy, earning millions from the blood of those slaughtered by his illegal wars.




How Blair was chosen as a peace envoy to the Middle East is beyond comprehension. As one of the instigators of the Iraq war which set the region in flames with sectarianism he is now the Middle East envoy for the quartet of the UN, EU, US and Russia. If anything, it shows the contempt the quartet have for the region and its people. How a bloodthirsty warmonger can bring peace for the Palestinians is hard to fathom.


Not unlike other deranged mass murderers, Blair seeks to frame others for the carnage that he has created. His latest attempt to make money from blood is to warn the West against “Islamic extremism”. In doing so, he says “they must co-operate with other countries—in particular, Russia and China—regardless of other differences.”[2]



It does not matter whether the Russians and the Chinese are violating human rights or repressing innocent civilians. But as long as they fight ‘Islamists’ then that is the side the West needs to take.[3]




Blair is only preaching what he practises. He has not made any secret of whose side he is on. You can count on him to be on the side of every murderous dictator and despot. Back in January he wrote that “extremist religion is at root of 21st century wars.”[4] Needless to say it was clear which religion he was talking about.



Then, just five days later, he gave staunch backing to Egypt’s military coup d’étatfollowing a meeting with its army leader, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi;[5] praising the despot who, after overthrowing the elected president, subsequently killed more than a thousand peaceful protestors and arrested thousands more. But for Blair this was necessary to “put the country back on the path to democracy.” By removing a democratically-elected president, of course!





For Blair, Morsi was simply too soft for his liking which is why he prefers to deal with a military dictator over an elected statesman. Democracy can be conveniently discarded when it does not deliver the desired results. Blair believes “We should engage with the new de facto power and help make the new government make the changes necessary, especially on the economy, so they can deliver for the people.”[6]




Blair is a compulsive liar responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims. It is an incredible situation we find ourselves in where the perpetrator of war crimes is blaming the victims. Without his powerful friends in the media and the ruling establishment, Blair would not have a platform to disseminate his propaganda. But, even his friends know that Tony cannot be trusted as Murdoch humiliatingly discovered about his wife.[7]



People in the west should be smart enough to see beyond the scaremongering and see for themselves where the real danger lies. The greatest threat facing the West are interests of the powerful elite that uses war as a means to easy money.





While Blair barks, his masters in the US demonstrate their support for democracy by going ahead with supplying ten Apache helicopters to Egypt’s military[8], a military that was complicit in the coup as well as the repression and abuses of their people for decades, and especially as of late. Of course in deranged minds this has no connection with how those on the receiving end of the West’s benevolence might respond.





So Blair, go ahead and keep banging your war drum. For now you may escape judgment but it is for a short time. Unless you repent, you will certainly answer for your crimes in the most supreme court of justice.





Source: www.islam21c.com
Notes:
[1] Al-Qur’ān 14:42-43
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27122008
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...litical-agenda
[4] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...ars-tony-blair
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...-fatah-al-sisi
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...rsi-tony-blair
[7] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...hip-wendi-deng
[8] http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...icopters-egypt
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Karl
04-24-2014, 10:50 PM
Who died and made Blair God. This rat faced Zio fascist makes me sick, what a hypocrite. The West has been taken over by extremists and mass murderers, but Blair whines about a few Muslims fighting back against invaders and meddlers. Hey! They don't want to live in your radical left/ right New Wold Order Zionist Empire. They don't want to be controlled from the cradle to grave in all matters domestic and public by the United Nations, Rockefeller and other Zionist Plutocrats or anybody. They want to be free, and if that means dying with their boots on, it is better than crawling on their bellies to you pigs.
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سيف الله
04-25-2014, 12:04 PM
Salaam

Interesting comment on how this speech could of come from Benjamin Netanyahu


Another update
This war on 'Islamism' only fuels hatred and violence

Tony Blair's anti-democratic tirade chimes with David Cameron's toxic manoeuvring at home and in the Muslim world
The neocons are back. That toxic blend of messianic warmongering abroad and McCarthyite witch-hunting at home – which gave us Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and the London bombings – is coursing through our public life again. Yesterday the liberal interventionists' hero, Tony Blair, was once more demanding military action against the "threat of radical Islam".

Reprising the theme that guided him and George Bush through the deceit and carnage of the "war on terror", the former prime minister took his crusade against "Islamism" on to a new plane. The west should, he demanded, make common cause with Russia and China to support those with a "modern" view against the tide of political Islam.

But he also demanded military intervention against Syria – backed by Russia – along with more "active measures" to help the armed opposition, which is dominated by Islamists and jihadists. It's a crazy combination with an openly anti-democratic core: the Middle East peace envoy also warmly endorsed the Egyptian dictatorship, along with the repressive autocracies of the Gulf.

Quite why the views of a man whose military interventions in the Muslim world have been so widely discredited, who has been funded by the Kazakhstan dictator and is regarded by up to a third of the British public as a war criminal, should be treated with such attention by the media isn't immediately obvious. But one reason is that they chime with those of a powerful section of the political and security establishment.

In Britain, the campaign against Islamist "extremism" is once again in full flow. In fact, it is open season on the Muslim community. For the past few weeks reports have multiplied about an alleged "Islamic plot", code-named Operation Trojan Horse, to take control of 25 state schools in Birmingham and run them on strict religious principles.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, a long-time neoconservative supporter of Blair's wars and Islamist witchfinder general, responded by sending in an army of inspectors to hunt down extremists and appointing Peter Clarke, the former head of Scotland Yard counter-terrorism, to investigate.

But all the signs are that the anonymous dossier setting out the Salafist takeover plan is a hoax linked to an employment tribunal case. A headteacher the dossier claimed the plotters had ousted in fact left 20 years ago. The only individual named in the dossier isn't a Salafist. Even the West Midlands chief constable described Clarke's appointment as "desperately unfortunate".

But there are now four official inquiries. Inspectors have gone round schools asking teachers whether they are homophobes and telling others their school will fail inspection because they're not teaching "anti-terrorism", while Gove's media allies have been fed inflammatory titbits to justify the campaign.

Locals insist the reality is that Muslims, both liberal and conservative, have been getting more involved in their children's schools to raise standards, not "Islamise" them. But the result of the uproar has been to poison community relations and deter ordinary Muslims from taking part in civic life for fear of being branded "extremist".

William Shawcross, the Charity Commission chairman and another neocon ideologue, has meanwhile declared "Islamist extremism" the "most deadly" problem facing charities and promised tough measures to crack down on it, however it might be defined.

Then the Muslim mayor of Tower Hamlets, the former Labour councillor Lutfur Rahman – often described as "extremist-linked" in the media – has been the target of a new media onslaught. No wrongdoing has been uncovered, including by the police. The communities minister, Eric Pickles, has nevertheless sent in inspectors.

That follows David Cameron's far more ominous announcement of an "investigation" into the Muslim Brotherhood and its links with "violent extremism" both in Britain and abroad, with the possibility of banning it as a terrorist organisation. The motivation for this inquiry into the most influential political organisation in the Muslim world was made transparently clear by the appointment of Britain's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, to head it. The Saudi and Egyptian regimes both regard the election-winning Brotherhood as a mortal threat and have designated it a terrorist organisation.

So to appease Riyadh, finalise multi-billion pound arms contracts and align Britain with the emerging Egyptian-Saudi-Israeli axis, Cameron has tossed them a bone. If he really wanted to know about the Brotherhood he could have asked its envoy at the lunch he held for him last May at Chequers, before their elected president was overthrown in Cairo's blood-drenched coup.

Alternatively, William Hague could have had a chat with the Brotherhood members of the Syrian rebel coalition Britain backs with cash and equipment, and the US supports with arms. But that might have caused embarrassment to Whitehall officials who insist that young British Muslims going to fight in Syria represent the greatest threat to the country's security.

Which helps to explain the incoherence of Blair's outpourings. Western policy in the Middle East now verges on the surreal. Britain, the US and their friends are in practice lined up with Islamist (and al-Qaida) Syrian rebel forces while claiming they only back "moderates" – but deny the rebels any decisive edge and support the suppression of Islamists across the region.

Muslims from Britain who volunteer to fight or send funds to Syria, in effective alliance with their government, are then arrested and charged with terrorism offences in Britain. Britons who went to fight in Libya in 2011, on the other hand, were allowed to come and go as they pleased.

It is beyond hypocritical and cynical, but is part of a pattern of manipulation, support for tyranny and military intervention in the Middle East over a century. That record has been the central factor in the rise of Islamist movements and the jihadist backlash since 2001. This week's US missile attacks in Yemen, which left dozens dead, will generate more of it.

Meanwhile, in Britain and other countries preparing for next month's Euro elections, denunciations of Islamic "extremism" and non-existent plots, along with dog-whistle talk about Christianity, are the small change of the contest with rightwing populists. But the fear and hatred they feed will be with us for many years to come.


http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...-cameron-toxic


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سيف الله
04-27-2014, 10:24 AM
Salaam

Another comment

It is amazing that the Blair Creature does not grasp how much he is despised, especially by those who once admired him. He has taken to making speeches about doing good in the Middle East, where his Iraq policy helped to ruin the lives of millions for decades to come.

It also cost this country billions we could not afford, not to mention 179 British lives.

I still think the only way for him to regain our respect would be to take a vow of lifelong silence in a very austere monastery, where he could perhaps clean the lavatories. But he still thinks he was right, and many of his accomplices also still walk around as if they had done nothing wrong.

It is a gigantic scandal that Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq War, which ceased taking evidence three years ago, has yet to be published. Who is holding it up and why? Is it frontbench collusion between the parties? If Parliament is any use at all, it will force publication this year.


http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
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سيف الله
05-09-2014, 09:43 PM
Salaam

Another comment piece
Blair says the ideological struggle against Islam should trump every other agenda

In a widely publicised speech Wednesday 23rd April 2014, former UK PM Tony Blair has declared that Western leaders should “elevate the issue of religious extremism to the top of the agenda”.

One could ask: ‘Why address a man who has the blood of over 100, 000 Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan on his hands? Why take seriously a man who called it wrong on Iraq’s WMD and repeatedly retrospectively changes his justification for war? A man who backed two losing horses in Gaddafi and Mubarak? A man who presided over Britain’s policies leading up to the greatest financial crisis of the past 100 years? A man who changed his religion yet did not announce it fearing it would hurt his political career?’

The answer is – he may have repeatedly called it wrong but when he did so it cost the lives of many. Moreover, he says what policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic think, but cannot say for political reasons.

In Blair’s view, the battle of ideas with Islam is now of greater significance than the struggle over Ukraine currently embroiling the European Union, the U.S. and Russia. He sees it as of greater importance than the economic crisis, human rights abuses and regional conflicts involving Japan, China and Western nations more generally. He warned Western leaders they must put aside their differences with Russia over Ukraine to focus on the threat of Islamic extremism saying that powerful nations must “take sides” and back “open-minded” groups. He said they must co-operate with other countries – “in particular, Russia and China” – regardless of “other differences”.

In short, Blair would rather see the West support Putin’s oppression of Muslims within Russia and in the Caucasus, China’s repression in Xinjiang and every monarch and dictator in the Arab world, rather than allow the Muslim world to be liberated from 100 years of subjugation.

The failure of Western interests to secure a new puppet regime for a post-Assad Syria figures highly in Blair’s narrative – telling the BBC ahead of his speech that the West would pay a “very heavy price” for not intervening in Syria (intervention for a puppet regime, not for humanitarian reasons). He said the opportunity to create “an optimistic solution” had been missed with theMiddle East as a whole “in turmoil” because of the conflicts generated by radical Islam. Libya is in “chaos”, he says, “and a mess that is destabilising everywhere around it”, and Syria is an “unmitigated disaster”

Perhaps the most desperate notion of Blair is to misrepresent the turmoil and revolution of the past years as a“very clear and unambiguous struggle (a titanic struggle): between those with a modern view of the Middle East, one of pluralistic societies and open economies, where the attitudes and patterns of globalisation are embraced; and, on the other side, those who want to impose an ideology born out of a belief that there is one proper religion and one proper view of it, and that this view should, exclusively, determine the nature of society and the political economy. We might call this latter perspective an ‘Islamist’ view, though one of the frustrating things about this debate is the inadequacy of the terminology and the tendency for any short hand to be capable of misinterpretation, so that you can appear to elide those who support the Islamist ideology with all Muslims”.

Blair and his like have struggled for many decades to put the right spin on an argument to try and divide the world’s Muslims. From fundamentalists, to violent extremists, to radical Islam, and now Islamists versus his secularly characterised “moderate”, and a new category, the “open minded” – yet he still fails to hide his overt hatred for Islam in his words:

“Consider this absurdity: that we spend billions of dollars on security arrangements and on defence to protect ourselves against the consequences of an ideology that is being advocated in the formal and informal school systems and in civic institutions of the very countries with whom we have intimate security and defence relationships”.

It is of course a great disappointment to Blair that Islam, rather than muscular (violent) liberal secularism is taught in Muslim schools and institutions in Muslim corners of the world, yet hardly surprising.

What Blair does not tell the world is that the Islamic Revival that is occurring across the Muslim world – opposed and attacked by tyrants, dictators and corrupt democrats who all prefer to serve colonial backers – is for the liberation of the people from slavery, tyranny and colonialism. It is for a liberation of the mind from slavery to secular liberal ideas which are being imposed from outside.

By addressing the ‘central importance’ of the Middle East as the site of a large amount of the world’s oil and the site of the Zionist occupation of Palestine, he stated that he does not wish to see the end of the disastrous project started by Lloyd-George, Balfour and others a century ago.

For Muslims, the Khilafah (Caliphate) that Blair so wants to prevent – which existed until the last century of chaos and insecurity – was based upon their Islamic beliefs, is part of their history, and the source of their unity and strength.

Its return is inevitable and will prove Blair wrong yet again, insha’Allah.


http://www.hizb.org.uk/current-affai...y-other-agenda




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