Tony Blair: ‘The West is asleep on the issue of Islamist extremism’

Telegraph:

 The former Labour prime minister talks about religion and politics, lessons from the financial crisis and the future of the euro

Tony Blair: “It is important that we are prepared to speak up and speak out from the position of faith.

Tony Blair: “It is important that we are prepared to speak up and speak out from the position of faith.” Photo: Andrew Crowley

7:53PM BST 23 Jul 2012

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Tony Blair is vigorous proof of life after political death. He is back in London, looking well, smartly dressed in the combination of blue suit and brown shoes that, traditionally, is the mark of being not quite a gentleman. “I’ve put my tie on for The Daily Telegraph,” he says. He will be at the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday.

But today , he has a different purpose. The Westminster Faith Debates, chaired by his former home secretary Charles Clarke, will close with a conversation tonight between Mr Blair, the Archbishop of Canterbury and me. The subject is religion and society.

The nation’s most famous Catholic convert set up his Faith Foundation to tackle such questions. He speaks of the future. The “fundamentalist doctrines of politics”, such as fascism and communism, he says, went out with the 20th century. In the 21st, when globalisation has pushed people ever closer together, the disputed territory and, he warns, the “dominant security threat”, relate to religion and culture. He wants to provide the “platform” where people of different faiths can together find out what unites them.

Tony Blair has written ”I’ve always been more interested in religion than politics’’, a striking thought for a prime minister, so I ask him why. Religion, he says, engages with ”the fundamental truths about life’’. He feels he is now ”deeply familiar with the rules of politics’’; in religion, ”there is so much that is still unexplored’’.

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…And here, Tony Blair has grown sterner. After September 11, 2001, he now thinks, he underestimated the power of the bad ”narrative’’ of Islamist extremists. That narrative – that ”The West oppresses Islam” – ”is still there. If anything, it has grown.’’ It seeks ”supremacy not coexistence’’. He fears that ”The West is asleep on this issue’’, and yet it is the biggest challenge. In Africa, all the good things he sees through his Africa Governance Initiative face ”this threat above all others’’. In ”Sudan, Mali, Nigeria, outbursts in Tanzania and Kenya’’, sectarian Islamist extremism is the great and growing problem….

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

8 Replies to “Tony Blair: ‘The West is asleep on the issue of Islamist extremism’”

  1. “In the 21st, when globalisation has pushed people ever closer together, the disputed territory and, he warns, the “dominant security threat”, relate to religion and culture.” Of course it does. When you advertise on sky-high billboards that you’re going to give a lifetime-long free ride to endogenous ethnic groups because you’re unwilling to cut through the thick when they behave with criminal violence when their parasitic demands are not met, what do you think is going to happen. Imbecile.

  2. Blair with all of the cries for DIEversity you have force upon the masses while you just live there in your ivory mansions. How about you shut the Fuck up Blair you Dhimmi lackey.

  3. “when globalisation has pushed people ever closer together, ”

    Well Tony, no one pushed them together like you when you opened the floodgates to Muslim filth in order to revel in watching conservatives get their faces washed in diversity. A special light pole should be set aside to hang you on..

  4. Tony, did you just wake up mate? A little late to talk about a problem that YOU yourself helped create. I remember working with a bloke here from Norwich in the 1980s, and he was already complaining about the Bloody Pakis.

    This is not my Father’s England. The pendelum has stopped…