Although I am not a fan of Tony Blair last week's speech was interesting despite the fact that he gave it.
In the speech, which you can read for yourself (see below), he essentially had his version of an Oriana Fallaci moment, although much more tempered and focused on Islamism as opposed to Islam.
He waves the banner against the forces of religious extremism and closed-mindedness asserting that the war is between belief and modernity. He goes on to say that even if a political party campaigns on the basis of a dangerous corrosive political ideology but stops short of actively participating in acts of terrorism, if the political goal of that ideology is to gain power through manipulation of the political process and then transform a democracy into a dictatorship it must be stopped.
He highlights the danger that the very freedoms that our democracies represent are fertile ground for the seeds of our own destruction. We allow anti-democratic, anti-freedom of religion, closed-minded intolerant political parties to participate as if they were one side of a conventional political debate.
They are not.
Still, unfortunately, he goes on to group the "West" with Russia and China against the Islamist threat.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows but China is a dictatorship and Russia is a modern version of Czarist Russia. Neither really promote the ideals of western liberal democracies. The only thing binding us together is that they too are targets of Islamist extremists.
Reaching for straws are we now Tony?
http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry/why-the-middle-east-matters-keynote-speech-by-tony-blair/
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