Blair’s pathetic delusions about Islam

One senses a tiny bit of reality penetrating the liberal dhimmi brain of Tony Blair, but not enough to make any difference. He admits that the government’s efforts to “win Muslim hearts and minds” since the London bombings have gone nowhere. That effort was based on the assumption, as Blair put it, that “If we want to defeat the extremism, we have got to defeat its ideas and we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West.” In other words, Muslims’ grievances against Britain and the West were based on their feeling that the British didn’t like them, so that if the government could persuade the Muslims that the British did like them, then the grievance would go away and all would be well. But Blair now admits that this hasn’t worked out:

It’s better that we mobilise the Islamic community itself to do this…. I know everyone always wants to blame the government for everything that is happening …. but we can’t defeat this extremism through whatever a government does…. We can only defeat it if we have people in the community who are going to stand up and not merely say “you are wrong to kill people through terrorism… you’re wrong in your view of the West, the whole sense of grievance, the ideology is wrong, is profoundly wrong.”

What Blair’s advance in understanding comes down to is the realization that the British government cannot “root out extremism,” by which he means that it cannot win Muslim hearts and minds to the West, but that moderate Muslims must win Muslim hearts and minds to the West. And the rest of Britain must just sit there waiting for this wonderful event to happen. In 1,400 years such a thing hasn’t happened. Why does Blair think it will happen now? Because he knows nothing about Islam. He is looking at Islam through his own Western liberal filter which defines the world in terms of inequality and oppression. If the Muslims were being oppressed and treated unequally, then, Blair’s thought process tells him, they would be justified in hating the West. But, since they are not being oppressed (indeed, they are being welcomed, accommodated, and coddled by Britain’s leftist dhimmi government), their hatred is irrational and they should drop it. Not seeing the reality of Islam, but only his own leftist preconceptions, he cannot imagine that Muslims in Britain hate Britain because their religion commands them to do so, and that therefore the only thing that can remove that Muslim hatred from Britain is to remove the Muslims themselves from Britain.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 05, 2006 05:00 PM | Send