In a keynote speech on 23 April 2014, Tony Blair blamed Islamic extremism for failures of western intervention in the Middle East. Here are ten things he neglected to mention about the extremism of his own political career.
1. Tony Blair has never shown a shred of remorse for the extremism of mass slaughter and destruction for which he was directly responsible, not least in Iraq.
2. Tony Blair is a supporter of extremism around the world, whether it be the dictators in Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan, the despots ruling the oil states Kuwait and Bahrain, or Israel’s apartheid regime that occupies Palestinian land in contravention of international law and countless UN resolutions. When prime minister, not content with waging illegal wars, he was up to his neck in CIA torture and kidnapping ‘every step of the way’.
3. Tony Blair defends and applauds the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government in Egypt, saying that it ‘was the absolutely necessary rescue of a nation’. He was a supporter of the Egyptian dictator Mubarak, calling him “immensely courageous and a force for good”,right up to the day he was overthrown in a popular revolution by the Egyptian people.
4. Tony Blair blindly ignores the catastrophes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, as he endlessly promotes more western military intervention, whether it be in Syria, Iran or beyond.
5. Tony Blair has called repeatedly for western military intervention in the Syrian civil war. He believes it was a terrible error that the west did not launch an air attack on Syria in August 2013. He says the west should impose no-fly zones and arm directly the Syrian rebels. He believes Britain should have invaded Syria, whether the British public wanted it or not (all opinion polls show a majority of the British public opposes intervention).
6. Tony Blair’s lack of self awareness and remorse makes him a highly dangerous individual and totally unsuited to his role as envoy for peace in the Middle East. He supported Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza. He never loses an opportunity to praise the Israeli apartheid state, one recent example being his sickening eulogy at the funeral of the mass murdering former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who he called “a giant of this land”.
7. Tony Blair is pathologically incapable of recognising that his actions have not lessened, but have hugely exacerbated, the threat of terrorism. When in office, his own foreign policy establishment concluded that his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were a major driving force behind acts of jihadist violence in Britain and beyond.
8. When under fire for his disastrous record, Tony Blair’s answer is to blame the Muslims. He attacks Islam as a means of absolving his wars from any connection or responsibility for atrocities like the London bombings on 7 July 2005 and the killing in 2013 of UK soldier Lee Rigby. He accuses Muslims of imposing an ideology based on the belief that there is one proper religion and only one proper view of it. As he well knows, this is not the view of most Muslims in most countries. It is true however of his allies in Saudi Arabia.
9. Tony Blair is an ‘extremist’ when it comes to accumulating vast personal wealth – now calculated to be over £70 million – by exploiting the contacts he made when he was prime minister, committing war crimes that should have seen him behind bars. He sells his services to merchant bankers, oil companies and despotic regimes such as Kazakhstan, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. He is one of the world’s highest paid public speakers, often earning over £250,000 for one speech. He flies around in a £30 million private chartered jet. On top of this, he takes £435,000 a year from the British taxpayers, who finance the prime minister’s pension of £70,000 which he still draws, the £250,000 cost of his security and £115,000 for his ‘political office’.
10. Such is the widespread revulsion towards Tony Blair’s extremism, that he cannot travel anywhere without fear of facing a citizen’s arrest for his war crimes. There have been five attempts so far. There is a bounty on his head for payment to anyone who gets close enough to apprehend him. See www.arrestlair.org for how you could pick up the reward.
