Blair, ultra Islam apologist, leaves Karen Armstrong in the dust

Tony Blair on Islam, in a 4,300 word article in Foreign Affairs. Be prepared to have your mind blown.

The roots of the current wave of global terrorism and extremism are deep. They reach down through decades of alienation, victimhood, and political oppression in the Arab and Muslim world. Yet such terrorism is not and never has been inevitable.

To me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is. I write with great humility as a member of another faith. As an outsider, the Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, much as reformers attempted to do with the Christian church centuries later. The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance. [Italics added.]

Under its guidance, the spread of Islam and its dominance over previously Christian or pagan lands were breathtaking. Over centuries, Islam founded an empire and led the world in discovery, art, and culture. The standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones.

Some comments on Islam’s being progressive and abhorring superstition. Of course it is true that Islam overthrew the tribal gods of the Arabs and the idolatrous practices associated with them, making the Arabs, who had been divided into perpetually warring tribes, into one people under one god. This was a tremendous historical achievement, even a work of genius. But what was done with that newly created spiritual and political unity? Instead of the Arabs constantly warring against each other, the Arab nation as a whole, as a new and larger “tribe,” was now set on a path of eternal war against the rest of the human race, a war that threatens us to this day. Viewed in this light, Muhammad’s great achievement of Arab unity is something we could have done without.

In relation to its barbaric antecedents among the Arabs, Islam was certainly progressive in getting rid of idolatrous practices and worshipping a transcendent god. But in relation to anything we would call civilization, it is barbaric. There is no extolling of science and knowledge in Islam, but their utter canceling out under the mandate to obey the unknowable god Allah and his Prophet in all things. Islam doesn’t seek to reform Judaism and Christianity, it cancels them out, subsuming them under Islam and commanding war on all Christians and Jews who refuse to admit that their religion is really Islam. And what about the Koran’s attitudes towards women, which Blair warmly praises? A woman is a field; plow her when you want. Divorce a woman by saying, “I divorce thee.” Make it so easy for a man to possess many women that women must be covered up so as to restrain the chaotic licentiousness that Islam unleashed. (See William Muir’s explanation of why the Koran commands the veiling of women.)

Finally, for Blair to say that Islam—the religion that commands the total subjection or destruction of everything on earth that does not bow down to Islam—is “inclusive” and “tolerant” is inconceivable. The man is a transcendent idiot. But guess what? He’s the best there is in British mainstream politics.

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Plucked at random, here is another excerpt from Blair’s article. How can someone be this idiotic and still know how to breath?

For this ideology, we are the enemy. But “we” are not the West. “We” are as much Muslim as Christian, Jew, or Hindu. “We” are all those who believe in religious tolerance, in openness to others, in democracy, in liberty, and in human rights administered by secular courts. [Italics added.]

This is not a clash between civilizations; it is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence—between optimism and hope, on the one hand, and pessimism and fear, on the other.

“Human rights administered by secular courts”? Gosh, isn’t that an awfully specialized description of what “we” believe in? Also, I didn’t know that courts administered anything. I thought elected governments and the agencies under their authority make the laws and administer the society, while courts serve the more limited function of making findings of fact and law in matters of legal controversy. But Blair doesn’t believe in any of that old-fashioned stuff. Blair believes in a world—which is already the world of the EU and Britain—where unelected judges are the rulers, using bureaucratically defined “human rights” as the all-purpose weapon to take away the actually existing rights of individuals and society.* Alright, we knew that, and that is bad enough. But what is new and breathtaking here is that Blair is not merely supporting this undemocratic rule by unelected judges; he is saying that belief in such rule is part of what defines “us,” the good people of all faiths who oppose the “extremism” of all faiths. The good people in Blair’s view are those who believe in EU-style bureaucratic tyranny, under which Muslims and Westerners are mixed together as atomistic individuals in formerly Western societies stripped of their historic national identities and their historic sovereign governments. But if “EU World” constitutes the “we,” then all non-EU-types, all traditionalist conservatives and constitutionalists, all traditional Christians and nationalists, are on the same side as “them”—the terrorists and Al Qaeda. And that’s why Blair can say that our side is as much Muslim as Christian, which clearly implies that the other side is as much Christian as Muslim.

And to think that this disgusting leftist creep is America’s most important ally in the world. He is the best we have!

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* For a chilling description of this “human rights”-based judicial tyranny, see Chapter Two of Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 27, 2006 07:19 PM | Send