The conference of the fools

Tony Blair went directly from being prime minister of Great Britain, a post he had occupied for ten years, to being the representative of the so-called Quartet in the Mideast “peace” process which is being pushed toward the absurd conference in Annapolis this week. First, as a matter of form, I think it is a bad idea for a man who has just stepped down from a long term as head of government immediately to assume another important public post. He needs a transition, a period to decompress and gain some perspective—and also to give the world a break from him.

More importantly, Blair is the worst possible person to be involved in any kind of negotiations with Muslims, given his dangerous liberal delusions on the subject. Consider what he wrote in a major article in Foreign Affairs in early 2007:

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.

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.

Blair is, in short, terminally naive about the nature of Islam. (And let’s not forget the fact that his wife, Cheri, is a typical leftist Israel hater.)

But, that said, what’s the point of arguing against Blair’s playing a leading role as a Mideast negotiator, given that everyone in the current international establishment has the same liberal delusions as Blair, or worse? And that includes the Israelis. Nowadays it’s hard to tell any difference between the Israeli leftist peaceniks who launched and pushed the Oslo process and the current leaders of the Israeli government, the pathetic and unmanly Olmert and his pathetic foreign secretary, Tsipi Livni, both of whom, if you can believe it, came up in the Likud, but have long since gotten on board the train to a Palestinian state. In back of all this is President Bush. Although the left considers Bush a right-winger, and some conservatives still see him as the heir of Reagan, the reality is that he is Reagan in reverse. He has hollowed out conservatism in every dimension—including even the conservatism of those Israelis who once were serious about surviving as a nation.

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Alex K. writes:

Blair writes: “[Islam] is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance.”

Do you have any idea what he could possibly mean by this? “[I]n attitudes toward marriage [and] women” Islam was practical and ahead of its time???

LA replies:

I don’t think he means anything by it, in the sense of his words having some intended objective meaning. The statement is not a statement about the external world, but the expression of a ideological sensibility. Namely, he feels, as best, distaste and guilt toward his own civilization, and, at worst, contempt and hatred (if that evaluation sounds extreme, remember that this is the man who as prime minister of Great Britain declared that his aim was to “sweep away those forces of conservatism”), and therefore he romanticizes the non-Western Other—and the more hideous the Other is, the more he romanticizes it.

LA continues:

Blair, speech to Labor Party conference, September 1999:

Today at the frontier of the new Millennium I set out for you how, as a nation, we renew British strength and confidence for the 21st century; and how, as a Party reborn, we make it a century of progressive politics after one dominated by Conservatives.

A New Britain where the extraordinary talent of the British people is liberated from the forces of conservatism that so long have held them back, to create a model 21st century nation, based not on privilege, class or background, but on the equal worth of all.

And New Labour, confident at having modernised itself, now the new progressive force in British politics which can modernise the nation, sweep away those forces of conservatism to set the people free.

He’s basically equating everything about Britain in the 20th century,—or rather everything about Britain that ever was, since throughout its history and up to the present moment Britain as a society was never based on “the equal worth of all,” but rather on “privilege, class or background”—with the “conservatism” that must be swept away. Everything in Britain that is not based on the equal worth of all is the conservatism that must be swept away. This statement, which is to cultural Marxism what “you have nothing to lose but your chains” was to Marxism, is nothing less than a declaration of war against Britain as a historically existing society, since Britain by the very fact of being a British nation was exclusive, racist, and unequal regarding all non-British people.

And now we know why Blair pursued the unprecedentedly open immigration policies of the last ten years and the open-arms welcome and acceptance of Islam and Muslim jihadism, and why he criminalized any critical speech about Islam and why he caused to be knighted, one month before the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London, the UK Muslim leader whose publicly expressed aim was to criminalize any true statements about Islamic terrorism.

LA continues:

Plucked at random, here is another excerpt from Blair’s Foreign Affairs article. How does someone this idiotic still live?

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.

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.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

While Blair’s Foreign Affairs article does indicate some rather obvious distaste for his own historic civilization, that’s not even the most striking thing about it. What makes his prose so stomach-turning is its sheer obsequiousness. He speaks with the same cautious reverence as The New York Times did when they explained their refusal to run the infamous Mohammed cartoons “out of respect for Islam,” or the increasing number of European publications that follow every reference to Mohammed with the verbal genuflection, “peace be upon him.” The most bracing comment is this: “I write with great humility as a member of another faith.” Is there another religion on earth that induces liberals to such groveling, as though the sheer fact of being a non-Muslim must of necessity move one to regard it only with “great humility”?

And don’t even get me started on his description of Islam’s relationship to Christianity—the Koran’s entire theological premise is that Christianity is a wicked heresy and a distortion of God’s revelation that must be annihilated to the greatest possible extent, and its adherence slain or forced into servitude. Blair goes on to describe with awe and wonder, but without a hint of regret, the way in which the Koran “guided” its followers to conquer and enslave historical Christendom (notably absent is any mention of the Jews), “founding an empire” on the corpses of countless thousands of his co-religionists. One could be forgiven, reading this passage of Islamic triumphalism, if he forgot that it was not written by a Muslim at all. I find this growing tendency of liberal elites to fall publicly prostrate before Islam one of the truly fascinating, if horrifying, phenomena of our day.

What is the world is wrong with these people?

LA replies:

“What is the world is wrong with these people?”

But that is the question I was trying to answer. Mr. McLaughlin gets at the obsequiousness, which I agree is the most striking thing in the Blair quote, but he has no answer as to why this phenomenon exists. What is wrong with these people is liberalism, the belief (as Blair put it) in the “equal worth” of all human beings, which translates into the moral condemnation of our own civilization for being more successful than non-Western non-white societies, and into obsequiousness toward non-Western societies to create the equality that doesn’t actually exist but should exist. But this effort to create equality involves undeservedly tearing down our own civilization and people and undeservedly puffing up other civilizations and peoples, which means treating the other civilizations and peoples as having superior worth to our own. The moment you make the “equal worth of all” your lodestar, you are logically required to engage in a vicious double standard, as I explained in my article, “How to Oppose Liberal Intolerance.”

Gintas writes:

Sage McLaughlin, whose comments I always find interesting, asks: “What is the world is wrong with these people?”

Are we not lliving in the middle of a Dark Age? Our ruling and opinion elites are detached from reality and history, in a willfully proud way, hand-in-hand with a powerful and delusional belief in the advanced state of their enlightenment.

Therefore, we see in Tony Blair that Islam is what Blair wants it to be, not what it really is. His will triumphs over reality, he is above and beyond reality. In short, he thinks as though he were a god. And that is what’s wrong with these people.

LA replies:

Indeed. To establish the equal worth of all human beings and all human societies, a godlike task to be sure, Blair must make Islam what he wants it to be. He thus creates a second reality, different from the reality of the actual world in which we live.

Indian living in the West writes:

I have a friend who says:

“Blair never read the book [the Koran] in his life.

“This is what some liberal scholar said and he repeats it like a parrot.

“It suits his prejudices and his vanity at being a tolerant and sympathetic man.”

LA replies:

That sounds about right.

But if it is right, think of the intellectual condition of a man who has been the head of a leading nation for ten years, has a major and troublesome and largely openly hostile Muslim population in his country, is dealing constantly with Muslim terror issues, yet feels perfectly comfortable making authoritative pronouncments on the nature of Islam that consist of nothing more than the parotting of some “expert,” probably Karen Armstrong.

And they say Bush has no curiosity!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 25, 2007 08:42 PM | Send