Blair: bellicose man of tolerance

Here are excerpts from Tony Blair’s speech of 7-16-05, interspersed with my comments:

The 20th century showed how powerful political ideologies could be. This is a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam, as far removed from its essential decency and truth as Protestant gunmen who kill Catholics or vice versa, are from Christianity. But do not let us underestimate it or dismiss it. Those who kill in its name believe genuinely that in doing it, they do God’s work; they go to paradise.

Well, this shows some slight progress. At least he’s acknowledging that the people doing these things are, in according to their own self-understanding, performing Islamic acts, not merely expressing “hate.” He’s no longer denying the connection of terror to Islam. This must have given his Israel-hating leftist wife heartburn.

But this raises the question, where has Blair been all this time? In this speech he quotes murderous jihadist statements from bin Laden, such as the call to kill Americans and Jews “wherever you find them” (echoing bin Laden’s teacher, Muhammad), yet, all these years, Blair has let jihadists freely and publicly, with no legal consequences to themselves, say the same kinds of things in Britain, for example, siding with Britain’s enemies and calling for the destruction of Britain. Does he take any responsibility for this cowardly acquiescence to our enemies, which unforgivably continued for four years after 9/11? If he doesn’t acknowledge the ways in which he has gone wrong in the recent past, what standing does he have to lead now? He’s still a confused, ambivalent figure, torn between his desire to defend Britain and his devotion to the religion of tolerance.

He continues:

We must pull this up by its roots. Within Britain, we must join up with our Muslim community to take on the extremists. Worldwide we should confront it everywhere it exists.

“Joining up with our Muslim community to take on the extremists” means far greater efforts than ever before to work hand in hand with so-called moderate Muslims against their fellow Muslims. But Islam is the eternal adversary of the West. Muslims are not and cannot be our allies. We will bend ourselves into pretzels trying to get them to work with us, imagining that they are turning against the Moslem militants, or that they are showing “signs” of makinig “progress” toward the point where they will struggle against the militants. All of this will be a huge distraction that will render us less able to defend ourselves.

If Blair is serious about pulling Islamic radicalism up by its roots (a leftist phrase that echoes his promise years ago to “sweep away all those forces of conservatism”), then that means a war to the death with large parts of the Muslim world. As our enemies recognize that we intend their utter destruction, they will be more inspired than ever before to wage merciless holy war against us, as we see happening now in Iraq. It’s a war we can’t win (short of killing every in the Muslim in the world), but we will wreck ourselves in the process. The sane alternative to a war to the death is my containment idea. We cannot pull up Islam—or, if you prefer, “radical” Islam—by its roots. But we can contain Islam within its historic lands where it can’t threaten us, and where we are not existentially threatening it and thus goading it on to ever more desperate and joyous mass murders.

I want also to work with other nations to promote the true face of Islam world-wide.

Like Daniel Pipes, though without Pipes’s realistic insight that supposed moderates may not be moderates at all, Blair wants a war to the death with radical Islam, while working day and night to cultivate moderate Islam.

The spirit of our age is one in which the prejudices of the past are put behind us, where our diversity is our strength. It is this which is under attack. Moderates are not moderate through weakness but through strength. Now is the time to show it in defence of our common values. [Emphasis added.]

As I’ve shown over and over since the London bombings, the “lesson” the West is actually taking from this attack is that we must be more welcoming, open, and embracing of Muslims than ever before. Thus Blair advocates a war on a relentless global foe, while insisting that we put all our “prejudices” behind us and embrace diversity. This is mad. If what now defines our identity is our “common values” with supposed moderate Muslims, then we have no identity, there is nothing left of us other than liberal tolerance. A society based on nothing but liberal tolerance cannot defend itself from its enemies. We glimpse the nightmare of a civilizational war led by liberals and leftists. A leader whose highest value is tolerance for the Other, CANNOT FIGHT WHOLEHEARTEDLY FOR HIS COUNTRY. He must undermine the very effort even as he’s leading it, like President Clinton with his postmodern-style threats to terrorists which his whole insincere manner undermined even as he was making them; or like President Bush, puffing out his chest and talking so big about the war on terror, while he sues airlines for keeping suspicious-looking passengers off flights and turns Americans into pathetic sheep with his demeaning anti-racial-profiling security checks in airports. Someday the West will have a war with radical Islam or Islam. But—short of continued terrorist attacks in the West—it’s not going to happen under the likes of Blair and Bush. People in a democracy must feel an evil, before they will see it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 18, 2005 12:31 AM | Send