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Blasted Blair – “talking” to Hamas!!!

January 31, 2009

Comment at end

1st February, 2009

IT’S THAT BLASTED BLAIR AGAIN

Just WHO does he think he is? A blasted peace-maker or something?

tblair_fingers_chance_hope

This much hope of peace?

Israel’s YNetNews and commenters at The Jerusalem Post have more or less blasted Tony Blair out of the water for his comments in today’s Times on “speaking to Hamas”.

At the same time Hamas have blasted him for suggesting they should recognise Israel and stop throwing bombs next door.

So HOW exactly has he managed to upset both sides?

If the Jerusalem Post’s commenters are anything to go by, it’s simple:

Mr Blair is asking Hamas to do something they have vowed never to do:  to recognise Israel’s right to exist.

And Hamas’s parliamentary speaker Mushir al-Masri (can’t find an online source so I am taking it from the Israeli sites):

mushir_al-masri_hamasheadparliamentarybloc

Mushir al-Masri, Head of Hamas Parliamentary bloc

‘… went on to criticize the content of Blair’s Saturday statements, namely the Quartet’s conditions for engaging Hamas, calling them “worthless and stupid. This is a repetition of the same obstacles the West has put up before, as an excuse to reject Palestinian democracy, hinder the Palestinian people and allow the Zionist enemy to continue its crimes – the latest of which was the war in Gaza and the refusal to deal with the legitimate Palestinian government and parliament. The reintroduction of such statements shows the stupidity of Blair and others who insist on such a useless proposal.”‘

Easy job, this go-between business, isn’t it?

As a disinterested outsider it would seem to me not too much to ask to recognise that your neighbour has a right to exist, especially when he plainly DOES exist, and has just proved it to rather noticeable effect.

But agreeing to that is too much for Hamas pride. After all, as far as they’re concerned they won the recent conflict.

They interpret Blair’s words in a tediously childish way:

“Tony Blair’s words prove that Europe and the world have understood that any efforts to remove Hamas from the Palestinian political arena have failed and that today we are the foremost force in this arena,” Hamas parliament speaker Mushir al-Masri said in a published statement. Al-Masri added that “the only way to deal with Palestinian issues and translate them into agreements is through Hamas.”

Now, as all these olive branches are flying and being duly trampled on, who am I to suggest or interpret hidden meaning?  But I will anyway. That’s what we bloggers are for, as sure as Islamicists (as opposed to Islamists) are Jihadists.

RELATED:

WHAT HAS ANYONE GOT TO LOSE BY BEING OPEN ON TALKING ABOUT TALKING?

If the talk of months bending Blair’s ear and pre-US-election pow-wows is all hearsay or inaccurate it hardly matters. It SHOULD be happening anyway. A set of preliminary get-togethers. Representatives with representatives only. Intermediaries to the intermediaries. This could get confusing, but it’s better than throwing dummies out of the pram (pacifier out of the stroller).

And Hamas could always walk out and say that they had changed their minds if they didn’t like what was on offer.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to grab the olive branches Blair, Mitchell and Obama are extending and break them into pieces with a surly petulance that would embarrass an average 13-year-old. You’d think Hamas must surely realise that they have to come some way towards an arrangement? They have to give some ground? If not, there is a danger that the whole bombing tit-for-tat could escalate yet again even as Gaza’s re-building work is just getting under way after the 22-Day War. Particularly so after today’s rocket bombs from Gaza.

And then there’s Iran. Elections in six months time might change its leadership, but right now, Ahmadinejad’s Iran says that Obama’s outstretched hand is the hand of the weak in defeat. And this Lebanese blog with its diatribe of hatred against Israel, indicates how many hands Mr Obama might need, and how many more envoys we ALL might need on the ground.  I do have one thing in common with this blogger, though; I too hate ignorance.

WHAT OTHERS SAY

Jihad Watch says Blair is ‘not schmart‘ to even think in these terms. Another article at Jihad Watch, by “Hugh” (also pasted below) has some useful history on Islam and the region, with cultural references. It states the bottom line as Islam’s intrinsic refusal/inability to work with (or even recognise) “infidels” as partners .

This is a well argued piece, but it is in the end a counsel of despair. If its conclusions are followed there IS no answer apart from a war of civilisations.

From Jihad Watch: ‘The ill-founded assumptions of Obama’s Address to Muslims’

The notion that America managed, under Bush, to lose some kind of special place in the affections of the Muslim world — a special place that it possessed because America “had no colonial legacy” — is the kind of thing you read in the cheesiest potted summaries of the postwar period (“because, boys and girls, America had no colonial legacy….”). Does Obama think that the Muslim attacks, from without and within, on the Hindus of India have to do with some “colonial legacy”? Does he think that the attacks on Christian Filipinos in the southern Philippines, or on Buddhists in southern Thailand, have to do with a “colonial legacy”? Does he think that Muslim aggression against non-Muslims in southern Sudan, or southern Nigeria, has to do with a “colonial legacy”? Well, only insofar as Muslims, wherever they do not yet completely dominate but are present in sufficient numbers to attempt to work their will on non-Muslims, will do so.

The business of America not having a “colonial legacy” and thus being somehow more natively attractive to Muslims misses the point, misunderstands reality. The Arabs of the Arabian peninsula – present-day Saudi Arabia – never suffered from “colonialism.” The Arabs of the littoral areas – Muscat and Oman, Yemen (and the Hadramaut), the tribal sheikdoms that became the United Arab Emirates – never endured colonialism. What they did have was the Royal Navy, suppressing the slave trade from offshore, and then, in this century, a few small garrisons, one at the entrepot of Aden Town, guarding the route to India, and a few among the sheikdoms known Trucial States — so-named because, of course, they were constantly warring, and it was the British who kept the constantly-warring Arabs from being at each other’s throats.

The only “colonialism” in the Middle East was that of the Ottoman Empire, and it was the British (and, to a lesser extent, the French) who freed the Arabs from the Turks. The British remained for all of ten years in Mesopotamia, roughly from 1922 to 1932, creating, and attempting to stabilize, that region. In Syria-Lebanon, the French were there until just after World War II, and similarly, were there as a Mandatory power, not a colonial one. It was the British who ripped out all of Eastern Palestine and handed it over to Abdullah, one of the Hashemites, as a consolation prize, the Emirate of Transjordan, because Abdullah’s younger brother Feisal had been given the kingship of Iraq.

Even in North Africa, the French were hardly “colonial” powers for very long. In Morocco and in Tunisia, they controlled things for about 40 years, and in that period the non-Arab Berbers were given rights that the Arabs have been taking away ever since. The only long-term “colonial” presence in the Arab world is that of the French in Algeria, who arrived in 1830 to suppress, after years of other attempts, the war made on Christian shipping, and who remained until 1932. In Algeria the French established, in this “colonial” period, the first schools, the first universities, the first hospitals, and built beautiful broad-boulevarded cities (Oran, Algiers); they brought in modern agricultural methods, too. Since the French left, Algeria has slowly descended into violence that is unlikely to stop. No, this business of the Arabs once being “friendly” to America because America had no “colonial legacy” implies that the Arabs suffered greatly from colonialism. Not only did they suffer far less than any other peoples in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, but they were themselves, and remain, the practitioners of the most successful colonialism, or imperialism, in human history. They conquered vast lands and imposed their language and their culture, everywhere causing the pre-Islamic civilizations of those they conquered to wither and die, with no one to take an interest in them, and everywhere used Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism. It is naïve to lump together the experience of those who did indeed suffer from colonialism, such as sub-Saharan Africa, with the history of the Arabs and their extensive conquests.

No, America is not liked for the same reason that the European former colonial powers are not liked, and for the same reason that Hindu India, for that matter, is and will remain a target of Muslim hostility and, whenever possible, aggression. For these are all Infidel lands. If Barack Obama or those who advise him are, just like their predecessors, unwilling or incapable of learning what is in the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, incapable of studying and then assimilating what the ideology of Islam inculcates, incapable of recognizing that it contains both a politics and a geopolitics, that its hold over the minds of men is far greater, far more akin to the ideologies of Communism and Nazism as a totalitarian regulation of every aspect of life, or at least would like to attain to that in its ideal, most comprehensive reception, then they are likely to make the same kind of colossal mistakes as the Bush administration did in Iraq, with its squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale.

The new administration may think it is “turning a new page,” but is it? Is it not repeating the mistakes of the previous administration? Is it not, like that administration, equally unable to come to grips with Islam as a Total Belief-System, still unwilling to consult the Western scholars of Islam who studied and wrote long before the Age of Arab Money (that has so corrupted academic studies of Islam) and the Great Inhibition, such people as Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, Henri Lammens, Arthur Jeffrey, David Margoliouth, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, Georges Vajda, and many others? Is it not still unwilling to listen to, much less heed, the testimony of the articulate Defectors from the Army of Islam — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina? All of those people should be invited to deliver, in solemn conclave assembled, their views directly to Obama and to his chief aides, so that, indeed, “fresh thinking” can take place.

But so far, it appears that it will be some approximation of the mixture as before, that is, hopeless, hapless, pointless “peace-processing” that may result – such things always do – in tangible concessions by Israel, a giving up of its legal, historic, and moral claims to land. These concessions will be made in order to obtain a “peace” treaty that on the Muslim side is – and must be – merely a “truce treaty” that will, as all treaties made by Muslims with Infidels must be, broken at the earliest opportunity, in ways little and big. For the lasting model is the Treaty of Hudaibiyya, and unless and until that phrase – “Treaty of Hudaibiyya” – is well-understood in the White House and the State Department – there will be all sorts of wasted efforts and naïve hopes, always to be dashed (but at Israel’s expense, and not ours, not at the expense of those who pressure Israel into these colossal, largely undoable surrenders).

And so, ignorant of Islam, we continue to lavish aid on Pakistani generals, for it was the Americans who paid for, who provided the discretionary funds for, A. Q. Khan and his science project. It is the Americans and Europeans who now keep the Slow Jihadists of Fatah going, who supplied Arafat with billions that have disappeared into the ether, and who continue to supply aid to his longtime henchman and Holocaust-denier, Mahmoud Abbas, who more recently says he has “chosen peace as a strategic option.” (But unless we know about Islam, and about Hudaibiyya, we do not know what that phrase must surely mean.) Abbas is having a good run as the nobody-here-but-us-accountants public face of the Slow Jihadists. They are more worldly, more corrupt, more willing to delay a bit in order to get that Western aid steadily coming in, so that so much of it can be diverted for the use of the Fatah bigshots and their retinues. They seem “good” only by comparison with the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, but with the latter, in reality, they share the exact same goals, and differ only on questions of tactics, timing, and who gets the lion’s share of what loot.

The same goes for Egypt, a country that has not fulfilled a single one of its solemn commitments under the Camp David Accords to encourage friendly relations, at the level of both governments and people, with Israel. Egypt is in the forefront of the diplomatic war waged against Israel. Egypt has allowed, its government even encouraged, antisemitism on its official television channels, Recently a whole series was based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But this gets no attention in Washington. Meanwhile, the United States has lavished close to seventy billion dollars on Egypt, that is, on Mubarak and his courtiers, to pay for his Family-and-Friends Plan.

The corrupt Mubarak regime, one more in a series of stratokleptocracies in Egypt, allows itself to be given credit in the West for its supposed “moderation,” as reflected in its new enmity toward Hamas. But for years the Egyptians not only allowed Hamas to smuggle in gigantic amounts of weaponry, but many Egyptians acted as partners, and received a cut of the proceeds from Gazan Arabs in the tunnel-building and the arms smuggling through the Sinai to those tunnels. If Egypt today is not happy with Hamas, this has nothing to do with a change of heart toward Israel, but reflects only the Egyptian regime’s fear that a Hamas victory, or the perception of such, might encourage the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt proper. And that is something the Egyptian regime cannot abide.

The failure over many decades of successive American governments and its peace-processors to learn about Islam has resulted in all those Rogers Plan and Kissinger Plans, and the plans of James Baker, and in all the endless shuttling-diplomacy of all those peace-processors, including those four horsemen (in declining order of intelligence), Dennis Ross, Richard Haass, Martin Indyk, and Aaron Miller. All of them are innocent of Islam, and by this point willfully so. For if they allowed themselves to learn about Islam and to figure out why exactly it matters and what it means, then they would also have to admit to themselves that their past efforts were exercises in missing-the-point, squanderings of time and effort, while the real subject – the worldwide efforts to promote Jihad (that is, the “struggle” to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam) – wandered off by itself while the American government, fixated on making “peace” between Arabs and Israelis, did not so much lose the plot as never figure out the real plot in the first place.

American diplomacy in the Middle East, so time-consuming, so exhausting, so largely vain, has been based, as the goals in Iraq, and even perhaps the original invasion of Iraq, on a misunderstanding of the real situation. Just look at those professional peace-processors. Their entire professional lives have been spent ignoring the relevance, the centrality, of Islam. Islam, of course, is not something you can see. It is not something that accompanies a smiling Arab leader or diplomat, as he tells you exactly what he wants you to hear (which often overlaps with what he thinks you want to hear). Only after years and years does the meretriciousness, the deception, as a way of life manage to sink in. And even then, what is not being talked about, what is the Great Unspoken – the Great Unspoken is Islam, which you have to know about in order to recognize what it does to the minds of men, or so many men, that it cannot be ignored, cannot be minimized. In the life of individual Muslims, and Muslim states and societies, Islam is the central fact.

Yet, even those who Middle Easterners of Muslim background remain, out of filial piety or fear or other considerations (“effectiveness” might be one that they rely on), those who are certifiably fine people, the kind you might spend an evening with, real charmers such as Fouad Ajami and Azar Nafisi, never ever discuss Islam straight on, flat out, with non-Muslims in public – and instead refer glancingly or obliquely to this famous Elephant In the Room, the first by offering adjectives about “this tragic land, that had never known peace” (well, why was that, Professor Ajami?) or “the Arabs, who preferred to live in the past, in a dream world” (well, how does that connect to Islam?) and, in the Nafisi Persian-patriot Hafiz-Sa’adi-Firdowsi version or variant, we get “Irahn has a 3000-year-history, Irahn is much more than the Islam that the Arab invaders brought, and you cannot put all Muslim countries together.” And thus even Fouad Ajami and Azar Nafisi are in the end unsatisfactory guides to Middle Eastern reality. Do they in fact see right to the bottom of the thing, or do their own family memories get in the way of understanding, because they confuse those who ignored much of Islam with Islam itself, and do not grasp the truth of that statement that “there are moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate”?

They have invested too many years, even decades, of their professional lives – in essence, their entire professional lives – on the notion that there is a “solution” to the “Arab-Israeli” “problem,” and that this “solution” involves surrender of territory by Israel in exchange for “guarantees” by the Arabs, that is, the Arab Muslims. They think that this will constitute a durable “solution” even if, necessarily, it means that Israel loses essential control of the “West Bank,” with its invasion routes through the Jordan Valley, and is reduced to the ridiculous dimensions in which it was left at the end of the 1948-49 war, dimensions which the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a study commissioned in 1967 and not released for fully sixteen years, recognized as absurd and militarily indefensible. Not one of these professional-lives-devoted-to-peace-processing and a search for a “solution” – full of American naivete, they assume that everything is a “problem” and everything, therefore, must have a “solution” – has considered the difference between Making A (Delusive) Peace and Keeping the Peace. Right now Israel is, through deterrence, Keeping the Peace. It’s the best, given the texts and tenets and attitudes inculcated by Islam, that Israel or those who wish it well can ever hope for. Hardly perfect. Intermittent violence, no doubt. But it is only deterrence, only the concept of Darura, or Necessity, that will keep the peace. Darura is to be invoked by Arab leaders, in order not to go to war, and it can be invoked only if Israel is perceived to be overwhelmingly more powerful, so that a war would lead to certain Arab defeat.

But if you don’t study Islam and don’t recognize that Fatah consists not of peacemakers, however reluctant, but rather of warmakers, Slow Jihadists willing to be a little more patient and various in their methods than the impatient Fast Jihadists of Hamas, then you will continue to prate about “two-state solutions” and, with great self-assurance, tell the world, as does Aaron Miller (“adviser to five presidents and a Middle East expert”) hither and yon, that there are four core issues: settlementssecurityrefugeesJerusalem, or securitysettlementsJerusalemrefugees, or Jerusalemrefugeessecuritysettlements or…well, you get the idea), and once these “four core issues” are settled, it will practically be some variant of Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom” smack in the middle of the Middle East. Oh No It Won’t.

And of course, inattention to Islam has been encouraged by Mr. Big, that is, Saudi Arabia. Decades ago the propagandists of ARAMCO, churning out material for that glossy magazine ARAMCO World, and also helping supply material for those National Geographic articles on Saudi Arabia (usually with photographs by the ubiquitous Robert Azzi) helped to present a picture of, and spin a tale about, Saudi Arabia that, as J. B. Kelly wrote, “the ghost of Scheherezade could not have bettered.” There was Saudi Arabia, so ably ruled by the noble Al-Saud, who brought peace and harmony to the warring Arabs (even as Muhammad did, in the early seventh century A.D.), and who had been fast friends of America ever since Ibn Saud had met with FDR on that warship. And things had only gotten better and better. Yes, Saudi Arabia, with a little help of a small army of Western hirelings who served as such able propagandists, was presented, and until just the day before yesterday continued to be perceived, as a “staunch ally” of the United States. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. It is a country that has spent one hundred billion dollars all over the world on mosques, madrasas, Islamic propaganda, and buying votes at international organizations, buying “friends” in the capitals of the West, buying “academic experts” by setting up pseudo-academic institutes where nothing contrary to Saudi desires may be done, where all those of independent bent (see Denis MacEoin, and his experiences at Exeter, or was it Durham, in England) are driven out. The field of Islamic studies has, in too many places, become the preserve of apologists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, for Islam. Saudi Arabia is a state based on Islam, more fanatical in that state-supported Wahhabism than any other Muslim state, and it cannot be anything other than a dangerous enemy of all Infidels, even of the United States. It is true that the Saudis and the Americans collaborated in Afghanistan, but they did so for different reasons, and the Americans did not quite understand. Saudi Arabia was not so much waging war against international Communism, etc. as it was waging war against Russian Infidels. The temporary miscomprehension allowed the Americans to make the fatal mistake of opposing the Soviets by building up the muhajedin. No one seemed to understand that the Soviet Union, already greatly weakened, was hardly in the same league as a revived Islamic world, a world in flames (and not in flames because of Israel, as the apologists say), with Jihad on worldwide scale now seemingly made plausible by OPEC trillions, and by the millions of Muslim immigrants now settled deep within Western Europe.

Saudi Arabia is a permanent enemy not only of the United States, but of the entire Infidel world. And the fact that the Al-Saud have a taste for planeloads of food flown in from Hediard and Fauchon, for buying sprees and gambling junkets to the West, and summers spent in villegiature in Monte Carlo, and of course those planeloads or boatloads (right out to the yachts anchored off Marbella) of Western girls who arrive to console those Al-Saud for their oh so difficult lives (“my wives don’t understand me”), doesn’t change that fact at all. Basta con all this. Stop putting on yet another production of “Hamlet” without the prince. These student productions in Washington are really getting on everyone’s nerves. Unless you have a cadre of reliable advisers who have studied Islam, and studied the history of Muslim conquest over 1350 years of lands populated by Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, that is, people who have studied, and have had the leisure to thoroughly assimilate, both the doctrine, and the history of the practice, of Islam, more failures, different ones perhaps – in Afghanistan rather than in Iraq, for example – but still failures, will be the inevitable result. And so too will the continued dreamy belief that the Arab war made on Israel is a “problem” that has a “solution,” rather than what it is – an unassuagable, and inextinguishable, Jihad against the intolerable presence of an Infidel nation-state in the midst of Dar al-Harb, and what’s still more intolerable, one run by the long-despised Jews. And so the survival of Israel, if you care about it, depends not on any treaty-making that will result in further tangible concessions of land by Israel, but rather on Deterrence. Deterrence worked, during the Cold War, and amazingly, it was Soviet Communism that crumbled. Though Russia remains a despotic mess, it is no longer the military threat it once was to Europe, or to America. No one can predict what will happen if the Muslim world continues on its present course, a world of violence and aggression that is beginning to have its clear effects in Western Europe (the new center of the worldwide Jihad, and the place that Obama ought to be worrying about most). No one can predict what a determined effort to get off oil will do to Muslim or Arab influence, and furthermore, what might be the effect if the Western world, its elites made more aware of the meaning, and menace, of Islam, started to discuss, openly, Islam as a vehicle of Arab supremacism, and thus help make the non-Arab Muslims, who constitute 80% of the world’s Muslims, to think again about Islam and what it does to art, to science, to human possibilities and human happiness. If the non-Muslims themselves can begin to make the connection between the political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Muslim states and societies, and Islam itself, that will surely have its effects on the most advanced people who, through no fault of their own, were born into Islam.

But that requires study of Islam and of the history of Muslim conquests, and the subjugation of non-Muslim peoples, over 1350 years. Can the new Administration spare a little time for such an effort? If it wishes to avoid the colossal mistakes and squandering of the Bush Administration, it had better.

JERUSALEM POST (update 1st Feb) ON MEANING BEHIND MR BLAIR’S WORDS & HAMAS’S REACTION

Most of the comments are instinctively anti-Blair’s words, as is Hamas (officially). Now THAT probably means he is doing something right.

SAMPLE:

Headline misleading

Reading further I note that Blair said something like “Hamas must both renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist before it could be included in any talks”. Makes all the difference, of course. Then again, I don’t suppose either of those preconditions will be met and Israel will have to finish what it failed to finish before, the military extermination of all of the Hamas terrrorists.

The alternative? All out war in the Middle East.

Give peace … the man a chance.

OTHERS THOUGHTS ON THIS:

Israel Matzav not yet convinced

OTHER INTERESTING MATTERS

[youtbe=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cR4zRbPy2kY]

http://www.weforum.org 29.01.2009
Gaza: The Case for Middle East Peace
The uncertainty and complexity surrounding the crisis in Gaza have captured the attention of the world.

What needs to be done to prevent the Middle East peace process from slipping away yet again?

Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General, United Nations, New York
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey
Amre Moussa, Secretary-General, League of Arab States, Cairo
Shimon Peres, President of Israel

Chaired by
David Ignatius, Associate Editor and Columnist, The Washington Post, USA



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Tony Blair – wide-ranging Interview (Times) with pictures

January 31, 2009

Comment at end

31st January, 2009

This is a lengthy interview – seven pages in The Times. So I have interspersed it with a few pictures, for illustrative purposes.

INTERVIEW: Tony Blair on Gaza, Catholicism, Iraq and Cherie

Since leaving office 19 months ago, Tony Blair has rebuilt a life almost as frantic and globetrotting as the one he lived in Downing Street. Amid criticism of his role in the Middle East peace process, Ginny Dougary and photographer Nick Danziger join the former Prime Minister on the road to discuss Gaza, Catholicism, doubt, Iraq, money and Cherie.

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Blair with Saudi's King Abdullah-bin-Abdulaziz, 17th January, 2009

It’s an exhausting business interviewing Tony Blair. For a start, everyone has an opinion about him and feels the need to express it, usually with some force. Cab drivers, handymen and the like – certainly in the UK – call him all sorts of unprintable names. Their main complaint is Iraq, as is everyone else’s, but they also blame him for the spend-spend-spend culture which in their opinion has landed us in the mess we’re in now.

Move from the hectoring to the chattering classes and the arguments against him become even more vociferous. The general impression, however unfair, is that he has singlehandedly failed to bring peace to the Middle East, has achieved nothing in his role there as special envoy, earns far too much money, owns too many houses, and swans around the world raking in the loot for consultancies and speeches, probably at the taxpayers’ expense.

tb_guitar

The first rocking prime minister

This anti-Blair hostility could not be more different to the reception I witness him receive in Israel and, indeed, more surprisingly, Palestine – such as it is – where he is hugged, kissed, implored to pose for innumerable photos and sign autographs. All of this is before the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza. When I ask him what it feels like to be so love-bombed, he mutters, and it is hard to read the expression on his face: “Well, someone’s got to love me.” One of his bodyguards tells me that these pop-star scenes happen wherever “the Boss” travels in the world, except for one country. But even here, Blair says, it’s better than it was.

His staff – there are 70 of them around the globe – are all young and dynamic and fiercely bright. They seem to do everything – think, talk, move – at three times the speed of normal human beings. Blair’s team in Rwanda, one of two charity-funded African projects, whose brief is to assist President Kagame in modernising his country, is particularly peppy.

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Blair, a keen tennis player, raised money for Sports Relief

Then there is Blair himself, who has positively bionic energy levels and sometimes gets a kick out of other people’s failure to keep up. He doesn’t like it much, not surprisingly, when I teasingly (but truthfully) say that, in this way, he reminds me of Jeffrey Archer.

Blair has always struck me as a man in a hurry, only now he seems to be in a race almost against himself. In one of our interviews, I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world? (This was also before Gordon Brown inadvertently revealed his own Superman aspirations.)

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His Sports Foundation raises money for children's training purposes. He also entered runners in his charity's name in last October's Great North Run

Blair, who quite likes the simplicity of such questions, laughs and replies: “I wouldn’t be in politics unless I thought there was a specific purpose of making the world a better place. So the childish answer to the childish question is, ‘Yes.’” He goes on to say something that would have been rather unpolitic to express when he was Prime Minister: “I don’t actually like the business of politics at all. Some people like the political interplay of working it all out. Even though – although I say it myself – I can do the political campaigning pretty well, I never actually enjoyed it. I’m far more interested in the problem; in solving the problem.”

Those problems take on tragic proportions a month after our trip, when Hamas fails to renew the six-month ceasefire and sends more rockets into Israel, with devastating repercussions. Blair was at home in the country with his family over Christmas but, he tells me, “I was on the phone to the Arabs, the Americans and the Israelis the whole time.” He returned to the Middle East on January 2 and says, when he phones me later from Abu Dhabi, that he has been on four or five separate visits to the region in a fortnight.

blairfamily.jpg

The Blairs have four children, the youngest of whom was born in 2000 while his father was resident Prime Minister in Number 10 Downing Street.

I ask him whether he is surprised by what has happened, since the previous month he had been cautiously optimistic about progress, but he says: “No. I’ve been saying for some time that what was needed was a completely different strategy. What has happened has been very shocking and very sad – the scenes of carnage – but that is war, I’m afraid, and war is horrible. But although it may sound absurd, on one level, to talk about the possibility of peace, we have got to get that process right back on track.”

That process should be helped immeasurably by President Obama’s early appointment of former Senator George Mitchell as full-time envoy in the Middle East. Mitchell and Blair go back a long way, having worked closely together on brokering the historic peace deal in Northern Ireland, and when I meet our former PM for a final time as we go to press, it is clear from the tenor of his conversation that he believes this will strengthen rather than sideline his position: “First of all, it’s obviously good for me because we’ve worked together so closely, but also because I think he’s a very sensible, wise, but also tough person. And in relation to Gaza, we will have a better chance of getting a strategy there that offers people the possibility of rejoining the West Bank on the right terms.”

During our five days together in mid-November, and in several meetings subsequently, there is ample opportunity to observe the former PM at close quarters – and we speak often, in short, snatched bursts and longer one-to-one sessions. Although he is always relaxed – as he seems, indeed, in all the sessions that I am able to witness with the heads of state of the various countries on our trip – it is only when he has a chance to unwind, without constant interruptions, that you glimpse his humanity unmasked by that slightly all-too-ready actorish fluency.

tblair_smiles_wef_money

Davos, last year, 2008, in sunnier economic times

Blair’s schedule is as lunatic, if not more so, than when he was in office, but he’s a different man to the one we were accustomed to seeing in the final stretch of his tenure. The look of bruised defiance and exhaustion which shadowed his eyes has been replaced with that old bright blue sparkle of optimistic certainty. He seems happy.

There is something about him that makes me think of a man caught in the grip of a postponed midlife crisis, in a positive as well as a disconcerting sense. He has the glow of the newly-in-love; in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated.

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Tony Blair's first meeting, 2008, with students at Yale on his Faith & Globalisation course

There is also something of a grand folie – however important the work and the seriousness of his approach – about the Herculean scale of the task he has set himself: sorting out the Middle East, Africa, climate change, his sports foundation, his faith foundation, “making a case for faith as a force for good in the world”. And in order to be able to do this work pro bono (as well as keep up his hefty mortgage payments and make good his debts), he needs to generate an enormous income – estimated at £12 million since he left office. He’s achieved this by giving speeches (Blair is said to be the highest-paid speaker in the world, earning a reported $250,000 for a 90-minute talk), a teaching stint at Yale (on faith and globalisation), as well as delivering what he describes, with an almost embarrassed ironic flourish, as “my memoirs”. All of which might help to explain why, at 55, he’s in such a hurry.

When I ask Blair how often he manages to see his wife and son Leo, now 8, he replies:

“At the moment, not nearly as much as I should. I know…” Honestly, Tony, I scold him, do you want your marriage to fail? “No, I don’t!” An easy laugh.

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Tony & Cherie watching British swimmers at the Watercube in Beijing, 2008

“There’s clearly got to be a major recalibration.” Is Cherie not saying to you, “Hey!” More laughter: “Yes, she is.” Don’t you miss her? “Of course I miss her!”

I say that he’s always seemed to go at things at a breakneck speed, but now there seems to be an added urgency to his frenetic pace. “Well, it is partly true,” he concedes, “but it’s also because I’m building a new life. When we left [Downing Street], all I had was a mobile phone and Vic and Catherine [his old staffers] and even they weren’t getting paid.

“Eighteen months on, we’ve got 70-odd people around the world employed in various guises, and offices in the centre of London, and my two foundations established. So I’m starting, like, a whole new enterprise. But I wouldn’t be happy any other way.”

If there’s one, somewhat irreverent, lingering snapshot that exemplifies Tony Blair’s time management, it’s of him walking past my seat on the James Bond-ish Gulfstream IV – all cream leather upholstery and burnished gold accoutrements – distractedly undressing on the way to the loo, white linen shirt out, flies undone, although he flatly denies the latter when I later point it out.

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Blair's sunny disposition on show a few months after leaving office, November 2007

His body language is interesting. Although recent photographs reveal a slackening of that resolute jaw line, Blair still manages to retain a movie-star glamour. But when he is tired or off-guard, his left foot has a tendency to turn inwards which gives him an oddly vulnerable, pigeon-toed gait. Sitting behind him on the plane, with his socks runkled down to reveal a stretch of bare ankle, this was particularly pronounced, and as he scribbled and scratched away revising a chapter of his memoirs, he resembled a schoolboy swotting away at his homework.

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All the hours in the gym have paid off – the Blairs have installed one in their London home – and our former PM now has a positively streamlined physique. He holds himself occasionally like someone who has recently shed a lot of weight; with a mixture of pride but because he is temperamentally disinclined towards strutting, also a slightly conflicting awkwardness.

I am surprised by an occasional theatrical tendency: he calls his female staffers “darling” and, by day two, I, too, have become one of his darlings. I also catch him using the c-word to the outgoing Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert (the punchline of a jokey anecdote) and he reveals that what I had apparently mistaken for flashes of intolerance are what his son Leo refers to as “a Daddy moment”, when he “zones out… which drives Cherie mad”.

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With son Leo, at the Velodrome, Beijing 2008

There is a new sense of weightlessness at a deeper level, as well. Unshackled from the burden of office, Blair should be free to express himself in whatever way he pleases, but he is still feeling his way in this regard. It’s an intriguing time to capture him; the wings are definitely unfurled but he hasn’t quite got the confidence yet to take flight. I still feel the intervening presence of Alastair Campbell admonishing him that, “We don’t do God!” when I try to get him to talk about his conversion to Catholicism, for instance.

Still, he does eventually talk in a far less buttoned-up way about various subjects that were off-limits in the past – from what attracted him to Cherie to his doubts and deep anxieties over Iraq and Dr David Kelly’s untimely death, his own background and what formed him, and so on. We spend a great deal of time, inevitably, discussing the seeming intractability of the Middle Eastern conflict and his view of the new world order.

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He heard of the death of David Kelly when he and Cherie were in Japan, July 2003. Cherie said she had never before seen him so devastated

It’s important to remember, when reading the criticisms of Blair not making an impact on the peace process, particularly in light of the past weeks’ warfare, that his remit as Quartet’s special Middle East envoy is to work for the Palestinians on law and order, strengthening its security capability and developing its economy, to prepare them for statehood. “It isn’t to do the political negotiation,” he says. “However the whole thing is so intermingled and the one thing I never have a problem with is talking about politics with anyone.”

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October 2007, Blair visits Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem

Our first full day together starts with a breakfast meeting with Ehud Olmert.

When Blair introduces us, Olmert wraps his guest in a bear hug, strokes his neck and declares, “I love this guy!” TB then has short sessions with all the key players: Benjamin Netanyahu (former Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the opposition, and hardliner; tipped to be next PM); Tzipi Livni (foreign minister, and acting Prime Minister); Lt General Ashkenazi (Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces); and Ehud Barak (Defence Minister).

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Olmert on Blair - "I love this guy"

What does Blair hope to achieve by such brief encounters: is it just a general bonding exercise to facilitate better communications? “Particularly at this moment in time, when you’re working up to an Israeli election and a new President of the United States, it’s about working out where people really are, what it is they’re hoping for and what are the prospects of them being serious about negotiation for peace,” he says. “And, actually, today has been good in the sense that I’ve met all the key Israeli players and all of them are saying at least – and I think meaning – that they want to continue with the process of negotiation, and that they understand the need to make the changes to help the Palestinians do it.”

This was just six weeks before the outbreak of war. When I later ask Blair about the Israeli action, he says, “The Israelis did not want to go in at this point in time, but it was Hamas who did not renew the truce and it was Hamas who started firing rockets.”

Is it right to think that the key to moving ahead is to get both sides – and, crucially, Hamas to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist – to concede to the two-state solution and then to build on the precise terms from that base? “That is one thing, but if I have made any contribution to this in the last year in terms of strategy, it is an understanding that that in itself is not enough. The difficult thing is that what each side says about the other is true,” Blair says. “The Israelis have a genuine security problem and the Palestinians have a genuine problem with the Israeli occupation, and those two things are linked, so unless you find a way to work out that problem you’ll never get a political negotiation to succeed.”

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Historic peace in Northern Ireland. All sides laugh and joke, May 8th 2007, six weeks before Blair leaves office

There are useful parallels, here, that can be drawn from the long, frustrating years of negotiating the peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland – which once seemed as impossible to resolve as the Middle East conflict does now. “In the end, we got the IRA to a minimum point – and the minimum point was an acceptance that a united Ireland could only be achieved by exclusively peaceful means. Some people would say the sad thing about Northern Ireland was that it took a state of exhaustion on both sides for them to eventually agree, but I think it’s more that the IRA came to an understanding that, just as the British couldn’t beat them militarily, they couldn’t beat the British.”

When will you feel real frustration if you don’t see real progress? “We won’t get a new Israeli government probably until March – so probably this time next year [November 2009]. But in the meantime, there’s lots you can do.”

The next day offers an opportunity to witness what Blair means. We head off in convoy through the arid, stubbled landscape, pale ochre earth dotted with olive and almond trees, the homes looking more ramshackle and poorer as we approach Ramallah, six miles north of Jerusalem, the unofficial capital of the Palestinian Authority.

Tony Blair – bring Hamas into peace talks

Blair is to address the leaders of the new security force, as part of an initiative he has been working on with the Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and the US generals Jim Jones and Keith Dayton. The atmosphere is sombre, even uneasy, and Blair is going to have to work hard to convince his audience that he really is on their side.

As he takes to the stage, Blair opens with the greeting of “Salaam alaykum” (“Peace be upon you”) and a few of the men smile as they reply, “Alaykum as-salaam” (“And upon you be peace”). It’s an extraordinary speech, with no notes, and demonstrates our former PM at his most heartfelt, engaging best.

After explaining his role in Quartet (a grouping of the UN, EU, Russian Federation and the US set up to encourage the Middle East peace process, for which Blair acts – unpaid, he says – as special envoy), he talks about his work over the past year and how well he knows “the problems, the challenges and, indeed, the injustices that the Palestinian people face”. He highlights the importance of people being able to live freely in their own land but notes that, “A state is not just about a homeland, it is not just a map; a state is also a frame of mind,” and draws on the role he played in Northern Ireland, establishing an agreement and an authority and rule of law that was recognised by all the people, not just some of the people.

“There will be many challenges ahead, not least the occupation – but I know you have the will and determination to take your place in the community of independent nations… and I want to say to you that whatever we can do to help, we will… and that our desire in the international community is that bit by bit the occupation will be lifted, and that our aim is to support you as you build your state.”

After respectful but unecstatic applause, he is asked: “Why didn’t this happen when you were in power, Your Excellency?” which gets a big laugh. Blair joins in and pulls one of his Rory Bremner gee-whiz facial shrugs: “I knew I was going to get some interesting questions! Actually, I was interested in Palestine but I had quite a lot of law and order problems in my own country,” which gets another laugh, and the mood of the audience shifts towards him. “It was my aspiration as Prime Minister [to address the Palestinian predicament] but now it’s my mission.”

As more questions are asked, Blair rattles off the funds that have been raised to illustrate the level of support worldwide and addresses the humanitarian suffering in Gaza. He mentions his talks with the Egyptians in Sharm el-Sheikh, whose leaders are acting as go-betweens with Hamas, as well as his communications with Barack Obama, “who has assured me personally that the issues here will be a priority right from the beginning of his administration”. By now, his suit jacket is undone, his eyes are wide with conviction and the hand gestures are multiplying. After many more questions, he concludes: “We have got to be the people here whose hearts are up and that is the only way forward.” Afterwards, there are amazing scenes as Blair is surrounded by the men who looked so leaden and impassive when he arrived. They all want to shake his hand, and everyone wants to be photographed with their heads cocked towards his. He grins and grins; his teeth clenching and unclenching.

Later we reconvene for another interview back in the American Colony hotel, Blair’s apparently luxurious digs, an oasis of slightly faded splendour surrounded by potholed, derelict streets. Before we return to the Israel-Palestine conflict, it seems worth revisiting how Blair’s views have developed towards the region from his early days as Prime Minister. It is clear, at least, that he wasn’t doing some sort of PR spin when he told the Palestinians that he was always interested in their plight.

In 2002, for instance, Blair was at odds with George Bush over the Middle East – despite being called his poodle – and distanced himself from the US President’s call for Arafat to be ousted, saying: “It’s for the Palestinians to elect their own leaders. We have got to negotiate with whoever is elected by the Palestinians.” Blair was criticised for his pro-Arab stance after urging Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to continue peace talks after suicide bombings in Tel Aviv. In 2003-4, the Israelis under Sharon withdrew from Gaza; Israeli settlers who refused to budge were forcibly removed by Israeli soldiers and their homes were demolished. In 2006, Hamas won its surprise victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. The following year, Fatah was driven out of Gaza by Hamas.

Blair’s take on his initial distancing from Bush is, “What happened really was this: Bill Clinton tried heroically to get an agreement, couldn’t get one and then came the intifada [September 2000], which is the most important thing. It’s important to emphasise that because I hadn’t quite appreciated the degree to which the intifada altered everything.

“Therefore I understand why, when George Bush came in, he thought there wasn’t much point. However, the fact is that you were always going to have to return to the peace process at some point, and my basic view about these situations is that you never fail to grip them. You grip them the whole time.

“The bigger point,” he continues, “is that in 2004, when Sharon withdrew from Gaza – which was extraordinary – there were only two people who welcomed it at the time: Bush and me. And because it was done unilaterally, everyone else, basically, condemned it.

“It was an interesting example of the degree to which I was often pinned between a view from America that was not always expressed in a way that I would express it, but actually had some point to it – namely, that there is a real threat and we do have to be serious about this – and the rest of the international community who, at that time, almost didn’t want to acknowledge the threat.

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“It was a middle ground on which I was standing, which was fairly lonely for most of the time.”

Last July, Blair was to have visited Gaza but the trip was curtailed at the last minute because the Israeli security service had received “detailed and credible” intelligence that there was to be a planned assassination attempt on his life by a militant organisation.

After the three-week war, I ask him again whether he will reconsider visiting Gaza and he says, with some steel in his voice, “I will go into Gaza now because it’s terribly important that the community there knows that the international community cares. I would have gone in before, but when you are with staff, you have to think about the safety of the people who guard you, let alone mine, and the intelligence was completely credible, I’m afraid.”

Given that he criticised Bush for trying to remove Arafat back in 2002 – I repeat his quote, “We have got to negotiate with whoever is elected by the Palestinians” – does that mean he changed his view when Hamas was elected?

“Erm… certainly my basic predisposition is that in a situation like this you talk to everybody,” but he repeats the Quartet position that there can be no talks, official or unofficial, with Hamas until they renounce violence and recognise Israel. “I have always thought that there is a distinction between the difficulty of negotiating with Hamas as part of the peace process about the two-state solution if they won’t accept one of the states, and talking to Hamas as the de facto power in Gaza.”

Could I say, perhaps, then, that I suspect that you have spoken to Hamas in an unofficial capacity and you could give a Francis Urquhart-type response?

“Er… er…” Blair smiles. Is it tricky? “It is tricky, yes.” OK, I’ll just smile back at you then.

When Blair talks about America as not expressing views in the way that he would necessarily express them, I take it he is referring to Dubya’s “Let’s go get those bad guys” cowboy rhetoric and the neocons’ comic-book melodrama of the “Axis of Evil”. Although Blair is too sophisticated to use this lingo, he does seem to see the world in pretty black and white terms. Unlike David Miliband, who believes there is a series of un-unified, quite independent armed struggles, Blair’s view is that it is a parabola of implacable hostility.

As he tells me: “I think we still have our eyes closed to the nature of what is going on and I see a complete link between what is going on in Palestine with what is going on in Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia – and this is one fight, basically. Terrorism is now a very powerful weapon of war and conflict.”

So I ask him another childlike question: does he believe in good and evil? “I do believe in good and bad, yes, good and evil, I suppose,” he says. “Obviously, I believe they [the terrorists] are bad and I think our basic values system is good. But from a practical, political point of view, it’s more sensible to see it as a struggle about modernity and globalisation. Fundamentally, I think theirs is a reaction against the modern world, which is why their attitudes to women and to how people live and work are so backward.”

We revisit this battle between good and evil when we are in Rwanda. It is my first time in an African country and the photographer, Nick Danziger, who has travelled widely in the region, points

out its eerie silence in comparison to any of the other countries we have visited. As we drive through the deep valleys flanked by emerald mountains, there is a hushed solemnity about the people we pass – including prisoners from the genocide carrying long trunks of wood, still rebuilding the homes they had destroyed – and I am struck by the fanciful notion that the majestic landscape itself is still in mourning.

On the plane journey, I ask Blair if his Tigger-like optimism is ever dented by Eeyore-ish gloom. Does he ever descend into depression? He says that, of course, he has his dark moments. When we talk in the hotel, I ask him about this in the context of the genocide: does he sometimes despair about our endless capacity for brutality and bloodshed?

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“Yuh, absolutely,” he says, and talks about his visit to the genocide museum in Rwanda. “What is fascinating about it is that you see the extraordinary capacity to do evil that humankind has, but there are also stories of people who sheltered people, who gave their own lives to other people, who did the most selfless things. And so I deal with the possibility of hope in the sense that I am convinced that people, given the right circumstances, want to live peacefully with each other. I am personally convinced of that.”

Those who cannot forgive Blair for Iraq – and there are plenty of them, not counting the extremists – say that he is responsible for atrocities of his own. That there is nothing he can say now or do to justify the actions he took and the subsequent loss of lives. I ask him whether he believes that history will vindicate him over that decision to invade, and there is a big pause before his weary answer:

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Blair visits troops in Iraq

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. So there’s no point in answering it in the end.” Are you ever haunted by it? “I’m not haunted by it, but of course I reflect on it, and am troubled by it, and feel a great sense of responsibility for it. Of course I do.”

Blair has experienced the extremes of being both the most loved and subsequently most hated Labour Prime Minister since the Second World War. I wonder what such a dramatic fall from grace feels like. “It’s not nice particularly to have people distrusting your motives or saying you’ve lied about things, but the most difficult thing in any set of circumstances is the sense of responsibility for people who have given their lives and fallen – the soldiers and, indeed, the civilians.

“If I didn’t feel that, there really would be something wrong with me, and there is not a single day of my life when I do not reflect upon it…” his voice goes very quiet, as though he had retreated into his own private thoughts, “…many times. And that’s as it should be.” But after another moment of silence, he bucks up: “On the other hand, you have to take the decision – and I look at the Middle East now and I think, well, if Saddam and his two sons were still running Iraq, how many other people would have died and would the region be more stable?”

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1994 - Blair becomes leader of the Labour party

I can still remember the moment the former PM first entered my radar; it was back in 1994 when John Smith was leader of the Opposition, and this young Labour MP appeared on Question Time, blue eyes blazing, fiercely articulate, firing on all cylinders. Significantly, perhaps, I can’t recall anything he said but was struck by him having a weirdly Thatcher-like aura of conviction and moral certainty.

For all Blair’s achievements, it is that unshakeable belief in the rightness of his views that has bothered me ever since. Back in London, I ask him if he ever suffers from doubt. “Do I ever suffer from doubt?” he repeats. “Who doesn’t suffer from doubt? Of course I suffer from doubt.” Do you ask yourself whether you have done the right thing? “Of course!” But never about Iraq? “Of course. You ask that question the whole time. You’d be weird if you didn’t ask that question.”

Is your conscience clear over the death of Kelly? “Absolutely. That was utterly tragic but, you know, we did put ourselves through six months of the most intensive inquiry that any government has ever submitted itself to.” Was that one of your dark moments? “Yeah. Yeah… because I felt very, very sorry for him and his family. It was a terrible time.”

Although most of our interviews focus on knotty issues, there are lighter moments; while Blair enjoys locking horns and being challenged, he is also quite playful. On the plane we talk about Cherie’s book and I tease him about her disclosure about Leo’s conception in Balmoral. I ask him to repeat his response, since it had tickled me, on the record: “Yes, ‘Shock horror! Married politician has sex with wife!’ It’s like everything to do with Cherie… people go over the top. I don’t know why but they’ve got a thing about her.”

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Two bright young things in Chambers

I wonder whether he remembers what it was precisely that attracted him to Cherie when they met as young lawyers all those years ago. There is another longish pause, and then, “Yeah, she was a mixture of obviously very smart and serious and knew far more about the law than I did, but she had quite a feminine, almost giggly side to her as well. So there was a combination that I really liked of someone who was both smart and fun.

“I don’t think I could have settled down and lived with anybody I didn’t respect in terms of the mind and a capable human being and all the rest of it. No, yuhhhhh, we had a very good time…” he smiles.

It is noticeable how often Blair mentions the people he admires in terms of their braininess. He says that his wife definitely has the better brain: “Cherie’s just really clever. She got the top first at the bar exams and was streets ahead of me in brain power. But although she is more confident intellectually than me, I think I might be more confident than her in other ways. She’s got a certain insecurity as a result of her background. In one sense, I had quite a difficult childhood because of all the illness there was [his father had a stroke at 40, which robbed him of his speech for three years; shortly after, his sister was hospitalised for two years with a form of rheumatoid arthritis] but, actually, it was a very settled childhood in terms of my family.”

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Clinton & Blair - reciprocated admiration

When we talk about Clinton, Blair wants to point out something about the former US President that he believes gets overlooked: “The thing that is most remarkable about him – and he has many remarkable qualities – is his intellect. The quality of his intellect is extraordinary.” In what way exactly? “His ability to grasp an issue, then mould and remould and explain it – it tends to get eclipsed by the fact that he is also a tremendous politician and so, because he expresses himself in very simple and direct ways because he is a great communicator, people miss the intellect. I think Obama has something of the same quality, actually. I think he’s got a high-grade intellect.”

How can he explain the conundrum of George Bush; just how dumb or smart is he? Blair becomes uncomfortable, his eyes darting away. “Um… Well, people say that they want a politician who just speaks his mind, and then he speaks his mind and they say, ‘Oh, we don’t want that – we want someone who speaks like we expect a politician to speak.’ So I think that’s a problem for him.”

When we speak on the phone after Bush has presented Blair with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his support in the War on Terror, I ask him whether it is slightly awkward for him to have that relationship reinforced at a time when the outgoing President is so unpopular around the world.

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Blair receives the Medal of Honour from President Bush in January 2009

“Firstly, I am not a fairweather friend,” Blair says. “And also it is the greatest civilian honour that can be awarded. I’m not a great one for honours but it was very kind of him and I was proud to accept it on behalf of all the people who took military action.” He then reiterates the comments he made in our interview in London: “I think that people will eventually understand the nature of the decisions he took at an extremely difficult time. The fact of the matter is that decisions like those made after 9/11 are really, really tough. And I think that people will find this out as we get into the Obama presidency, because the expectations change but the problems don’t and the problems are tough.”

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Obama meets Blair, July 26th 2008, in London

Blair is confident that he will enjoy a good working relationship with the new American President. They have met half a dozen times since their first encounter, when Obama was on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “He was introduced to me then,” Blair recalls, “as someone who was very clever and a great prospect for the future; it was always obvious that he had something different about him.”

Prior to the inauguration, it was Obama’s speech on race that particularly struck a chord with Blair. “I found that very, very moving. I think that was when I understood that he had real political depth and imagination because it was not an ordinary speech. It showed a complete understanding of why people might feel as they feel but that actually it is time to move on. The thing he does really brilliantly is to explain why certain sentiments are inconsistent with the future and can be put to one side.

“Prejudice, certainly, but also that he understands that very partisan politics doesn’t really work any more and doesn’t meet either the needs of the time or the mood of the time.”

Isn’t that a bit like your philosophy, I ask, thinking how human it is to find someone especially brilliant if their approach seems to mirror your own? On the evening of Obama’s inauguration, at least one American pundit compared the euphoric mood in the United States to that of Britain in 1997. “Yuh, I think there is a new generation of political leaders who find the very traditional pigeonholing rather redundant, actually. Who have undergone this strange experience – certainly for me, but I think in a sense for Obama, too – which is growing up with a Left politics that was the politics of ideology, and then as we’ve grown to political maturity and taken positions of power, we find that it’s the Right that’s got ideology. Over time, the Centre Left became quite practical and the Right suddenly got ideology which I think still dogs it today.”

Although Blair is in a new mood of openness, there are limits, as I find when I try to get him to talk about his conversion to Catholicism – which is almost on a par with his response when I ask him whether he has, like Jimmy Carter, ever “committed adultery in his heart”. (“Now, Ginny, this is one place we’re really not going to go… That’s private! There are some human questions which it’s better not to answer.”)

But before we deal with matters of the spirit, I need to address the more worldly concerns of mammon. We know that Blair has never had a problem with champagne socialism and he reiterates his view that, “It would be disastrous if the Labour Party ever went back to the days when they had a problem with people who are wealthy supporting them.”

As for his own considerable earning power, he does not feel uncomfortable, he says, because, “I left office with a lot of debt, and I’ve got a big operation to support, and I do a lot of stuff pro bono and it’s not coming out of public funds.” He does not, he says, have a property portfolio: “I’ve got a house in London and a house in the country, and I’m probably not alone in that regard. It’s true that I have a place in the constituency [Sedgefield], but that is now the centre for my sports foundation.

“I suppose people disapprove of the country residence because it seems to be rather grand, if not grandiose. “They mistake the pavilion for the stately home which gets photographed but is not, in fact, the place we live in. I mean, it’s a very nice house but it’s not the stately home! Anyway, to be honest, I’m very happy with it, so I don’t feel guilty about having it. Sorry, but it’s as simple as that really.” Have you still got the Bristol flats? “They’re either sold or in the process of being sold… yuh.” How can you not know! “I do actually, but I don’t really want to talk about it because you get a whole load of ridiculous stuff out of it each time.” Have you still got mortgages? “Of course, I’ve got mortgages and I also bought at… [A big, rueful laugh.] You can almost spot where the housing market is by seeing what I do and doing the opposite. So, yes, I am being affected by the credit crunch.”

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In Rwanda, when I asked whether he found his faith a solace, he said, “Yes, I do, but I find it more of a strength than anything else. But my view of faith is not a very exclusive or narrow one. I think what people find difficult nowadays is to reconcile faith sometimes with very strict interpretations of doctrine of organised religion. But I think people can understand faith a lot more easily, and a level of spiritual values.” All of this was delivered with a great deal of swallowing and mumbling into his chest.

But what was it about Catholicism that had persuaded him to convert? First, he seems to suggest that his conversion was really a pragmatic matter to formalise him tagging along to church with the rest of the family. I understand why he couldn’t have “come out”, so to speak, as a Catholic when he was Prime Minister, as he says: “If I hadn’t been Prime Minister, I would have done this several years before” – he tells me he had been attending Mass for seven years – “but it would have caused the most extraordinary rigmarole. There would have been no end to the speculation.” But that doesn’t explain his reticence now.

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Deeply religious, Blair converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism six months after he retired

Back in London, in the snowy-carpeted Hempel-esque plush of the Belgravia office, we return to this and I say that he sounded rather glib about the whole business. Can he try harder to explain? After some flailing around, he says, with a struggle: “Look, the thing that motivates and drives me is my religious faith. I am a member of the Catholic Church but you would misunderstand me if it became defined in terms of specific rituals or acts. It is about values and beliefs; it’s about God and humanity.”

As we go to press, there is a prevailing mood of excitement as well as anxiety as we watch every move of the newly inaugurated American President for signs of how the world is going to reshape. A spokesman from Mahmoud Abbas’s office claims that Obama has spoken to the Palestinian leader before any other world leaders. The Israelis declared a unilateral ceasefire; joined by Hamas for a seven-day period only. Blair makes it clear to me that he feels his hands have been tied by his role with Quartet, not helped by “the US administration being at its very tail end and Israeli politics being in a state of paralysis since the middle of last year because of all the allegations [corruption charges against Olmert which precipitated his resignation].

“Although we did achieve things in the last year, it was obviously frustrating and I was on a steep learning curve. It took us ten years to deliver peace to Northern Ireland – so, of course, you can’t deliver peace in a situation as complex and as difficult as the Middle East overnight. That’s not gonna happen, but I think that the bitterness and grief of the last few weeks will fade eventually and, at last,” says Tony Blair, who, like someone else we know, chooses to be audacious about hope rather than resigned to despair, “we have now got the possibility of a quantum leap forward.”

Next Sunday, 8th February, at 22:00 American viewers can watch this ABC interview with Tony Blair – “Tony Blair’s Leap of Faith”.


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Tony Blair: “We must talk to Hamas”

January 30, 2009

“The best chapters in our economic history are those that embrace the many, not the few. In America in the 1950s there was a sense that everyone could have a slice of the pie. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher led an ownership revolution that gave millions a new stake in our economy. That was truly popular capitalism, and we’ve never needed it more than we do today.”

Er … yes, Mr C. So what’s the policy? Hard, isn’t it? Since Tony’s already implemented most of them.

Comment at end

30th January, 2009

Philip Webster of The Times is certainly whetting our appetites for Saturday’s full interview with Tony Blair. Here, in similar mode to his earlier revelations today about Blair’s doubts over Iraq,  he tells us that Blair says we must speak to Hamas. What a revelation!

tblair5

I don’t know about you, but I always took this as Blair’s position. It was an unspoken given. It was clear that the Quartet had its own position on this, namely that “we do not talk to those who deny Israel’s right to exist.” Frequently Mr Blair would fall back on the response, “the Quartet’s position is …”

It has always been clear that once a few formalities had been clarified Mr Blair would talk to anyone necessary. That’s how he did it in Northern Ireland. And Hamas, whether we like it or not, is the democratically elected government in Gaza. To talk to them is necessary.

Mr Blair has always seemed to me someone who does not like to stir things for colleagues. If he did indulge in this, he could have done so for Brown and cohorts long ago. The same applies to his approach to President Bush.  Apart from it being personally unpleasant and even rude, Blair knows that President Bush was NOT the only decision-maker in the USA during his time in office. Neither, despite being labelled as ‘presidential’ or ‘dictatorial’, was Mr Blair. If he had been, he would still be prime minister.

But now he is able to send a message to Hamas. Now that Mr Bush has left the scene and Mitchell and Obama are, presumably, onside about this approach to Hamas.

UPDATE, 31st Jan: The leader in Saturday’s Times has an excellent take on this “talking to Hamas” business. It exemplifies just how Mr Blair uses his diplomatic skills to achieve, step by step, his aims.  It’s all to do with differentiating between “talking with” and “negotiating with”.  The article interprets Mr Blair’s lack of a “no” response when asked if he had already spoken to Hamas as meaning that he already has. That may or may not be the case, directly or indirectly. But it adds to the speculation that will arise from ALL sides. Speculation that progress may have already been made.

Israel’s election is on the cards, and that may yet raise some enormous difficulties. But the big question now is for Hamas. It must learn to keep its own counsel, and not go blabbing boastfully that some people recognise their right to be consulted.  And Mr Blair and Mr Mitchell must not risk entering Gaza yet, regardless of the temptation.  Not until such time as Israel and Hamas have taken in tandem two steps forward and no more than one step back.  A dead envoy is no good to anyone.

Article by Philip Webster, Political Editor, The Times

Hamas must somehow be brought into the Middle East peace process because the policy of isolating Gaza in the quest for a settlement will not work, Tony Blair has told The Times.

The former prime minister implicitly criticises the strategy followed by the Bush Administration and Israel of focusing all peace and reconstruction efforts on the West Bank. “It was half of what we needed,” he said.

In an interview with Ginny Dougary in the Saturday Magazine, Mr Blair says that the strategy of “pushing Gaza aside” and trying to create a Palestinian state on the West Bank “was never going to work and will never work”. He hints in references to how peace was eventually achieved in Northern Ireland that the time may be approaching to talk to Hamas … “My basic predisposition is that in a situation like this you talk to everybody.”

He suggests that the policy was behind last month’s ferocious reopening of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that were believed to have left more than 1,000 people dead.

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Mr Blair, speaking after talks with the new US envoy George Mitchell, says that Gaza will not be pushed aside because there are 1.25 million people there who want a Palestinian state.

Mr Blair, the Middle East envoy for the Quartet group of the US, UN, Russia and the European Union, clearly believes that the Obama Administration is committed to a fresh effort to secure peace and appears to have been waiting for the change of government to make his strongest criticism so far of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Asked if he was surprised by the devastating events over Christmas, when Israel responded to Hamas rocket attacks by bombing targets in Gaza, he says that he was not. “I have been saying for some time that what was needed was a completely different strategy,” he said.

“Yes, we do need to show through the change we are making on the West Bank that the Palestinian state could be a reality. The trouble is that if you simply try to push Gaza to one side then eventually what happens is the situation becomes so serious that it erupts and you deliver into the hands of the mass the power to erupt at any point in time.”

Thought to be privately critical of the failure of the former US administration to give a full commitment to the peace process, Mr Blair says that the appointment of Mr Mitchell, with whom he worked on the Northern Ireland peace process, indicated a “real commitment” by America.

Hinting at a change of tack he says that with Mr Mitchell as a full-time envoy there will be a better chance of a strategy in Gaza “that offers people the possibility of rejoining the West Bank on the right terms”.

Mr Blair also receives a warm endorsement today for his Middle East work from Bill Clinton, the former US President. He says that Mr Blair and Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, “will work well together” towards achieving a lasting peace.

Mr Clinton says of Mr Blair: “He has done really important work as Middle East envoy under particularly difficult circumstances. I have always admired Tony’s willingness to wade into troubled waters and make tough decisions, as he did in helping to end 30 years of sectarian violence and broker a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. He is demonstrating that same dedication and intensity to promoting economic opportunity and political resolution in the Middle East, knowing from experience that the concrete benefits can play a crucial role in making a just and lasting peace possible. As Hillary begins her work as US Secretary of State, I know she and Tony will work well together toward that end.”

Asked whether he had changed his view about talking to Hamas since the Palestinian elections, Mr Blair replies that his “basic predisposition is that in a situation like this you talk to everybody”.

However, he repeats the Quartet position that there can be no talks, official or unofficial, with Hamas until they renounce violence and recognise Israel.

Mr Blair then says that there is a distinction between the difficulty of negotiating with Hamas as part of a peace process if they would not accept one of the states in the two-state solution, and “talking to Hamas as the de facto power in Gaza”.

He declines to answer whether he has talked to Hamas unofficially, although his staff later insist that he has not, and that all contacts have been via Egyptian diplomats. Under intense questioning later he replied: “I do think it is important that we find a way of bringing Hamas into this process, but it can only be done if Hamas are prepared to do it on the right terms.”

Pressed to go further Mr Blair says that he has to be careful how he expresses things because “if you do this in the wrong way it can destabilise the very people in Palestine who have been working all through for the moderate cause”.

He added: “We do have to find a way of making sure that the choice is put before Hamas and the people of Gaza in a clear, understandable, unambiguous way, for them to choose their future. You have to find a way of communicating that choice to them in their terms. Now exactly what way you choose at the moment, that is an open question.”

Diplomats will point out that Mr Blair fully signed up to the Annapolis accord which envisaged the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008 whether Gaza was part of it or not. Even though sceptics said that the goal was unrealistic, Mr Blair insisted that a deal could be done by the end of last year.



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Blair “not concerned” over pre-Iraq War Cabinet Meetings/Minutes

January 30, 2009

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30th January, 2009

BLAIR: “The consequences of this go far beyond the individual cabinet meetings when I was prime minister. I think it is best to leave to the present government.” The ‘consequences’ he refers to may have little to do with the Iraq decision-making process but everything to do with disregarding the present 30 year rule. If Brown’s government capitulates on this, they will need to wear gags and use invisible ink in ALL future cabinet meetings.  Now THAT’S a “consequence”. REALLY secretive, timid decision-making.

BOVVERED? I AIN’T BOVVERED – Says Blair (watch video below)

Well, why should he be? All the release of these Minutes will show is that the decision was discussed adequately, that his cabinet did not vote against, and that the legal advice may, just may, have altered somewhat between meeting one and meeting two. THAT’S what a legal adviser is THERE for – to make sure he knows what he’s talking about!

All right – they may also show that this cabinet was pretty supine. That’s what Blair was working with. Apart from Brown, who used to sulk like a moody teenager, the quality wasn’t there. That’s partially why Blair developed his so-called “sofa government”. (The quality’s still not there in cabinet, imho. Wonder how the sulking “teenager” copes now?)

But as it happens they were right in this decision, even if by default. Whether the little Blair Bashers like it or not, it was a Blair proposal, Cabinet motion, then parliamentary decision. You won’t get Mr Blair alone for this, guys. You’ll have to put them all in the dock.

No wonder Mr Blair is content to leave it to the present government to sort out.

tblair_iraqcabinet_heknowsyouknowDAVOS, Switzerland (CNN) — Former British prime minister Tony Blair said Friday he was “not concerned” by a ruling that details of cabinet meetings in the run-up to the Iraq war should be made public and told CNN the release of the minutes was a decision for the current government.

Blair committed UK forces to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 despite strong domestic opposition to British involvement.

“My reaction is that this is for the government now to deal with,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview at the World Economic Forum.

“The consequences of this go far beyond the individual cabinet meetings when I was prime minister. I think it is best to leave to the present government.”

Asked whether he was concerned about the contents of the the minutes, Blair said: “I’m not concerned at all.”

Blair, currently a special envoy for the “Quartet” of Middle Eastern peacemakers — the U.N., the U.S., the EU and Russia — said he was “concentrating on the Middle East peace process.”

The UK’s Information Tribunal ruled earlier this month that the government must release notes from two key meetings in which it committed to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“This is an exceptional case,” the tribunal wrote in its verdict, declaring that the public interest in learning how the government made its decision outweighed the need to keep government discussions confidential.

The Cabinet has been fighting for nearly two years to keep the notes secret. It has 28 days to appeal the decision.

The decision covers only the official minutes of the meetings on March 13 and March 17, 2003, days before the invasion of Iraq began on the night of March 19.

The notes will be edited “to avoid unnecessary risk to the UK’s international relations,” the tribunal ruled.

The agency rejected a separate request for the release of informal notes taken by participants at the meetings.

At the March 17 meeting, Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith laid out his opinion that there was legal justification for the invasion, according to the ruling. He presented his views to Britain’s Parliament later the same day, which made them available to the public.

HE AIN’T BOVVERED

The Information Tribunal’s responsibilities and authority to sit in judgement of this kind of sensitive government business were widened following Tony Blair’s government’s Freedom of Information Act, 2000. It’s not the first time Mr Blair and colleagues have been threatened with being hoist by their own petard.

But there you go. That’s gratitude for you.



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FBI rumbles CAIR – Wonder what Obama makes of this?

January 30, 2009

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30th January, 2009

IT ISN’T ALL MOTHERHOOD AND APPLE PIE IN TODAY’S AMERICA, MR OBAMA

CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Its acronym, if widespread opinion is to be believed, belies what it really cares about. Does the FBI know something the new president doesn’t? All right, I’m full of rhetoricals.

I wonder when any British authorities will get around to a bit of naming and shaming? Apart from naming our own as the bad guys, of course. It’s a wonderful world.

I find it intriguing that the opposition to President Obama is coming from such diverse quarters. Perhaps that is to be expected since the Democrats control BOTH Houses, and America has a Democratic president.

Read the article below from The Investigative Project on Terrorism. It makes interesting reading.

Then click here to see a few others who are sending messages to the new president. Tough at the top. Isn’t it?

The Investigative Project on Terrorism

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has cut off contacts with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) amid mounting concern about the Muslim advocacy group’s roots in a Hamas-support network, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned.

The decision to end contacts with CAIR was made quietly last summer as federal prosecutors prepared for a second trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), an Islamic charity accused of providing money and political support to the terrorist group Hamas, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

CAIR and its chairman emeritus, Omar Ahmad, were named un-indicted co-conspirators in the HLF case. Both Ahmad and CAIR’s current national executive director, Nihad Awad, were revealed on government wiretaps as having been active participants in early Hamas-related organizational meetings in the United States. During testimony, FBI agent Lara Burns described CAIR as a front organization.

Hamas is a US-designated foreign terrorist organization, and it’s been illegal since 1995 to provide support to it within the United States.

The decision to end contacts with CAIR is a significant policy change for the FBI. For years, the FBI worked with the national organization and its state chapters to address Muslim community concerns about the potential for hate crimes and other civil liberty violations in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

But critics said the FBI improperly conferred legitimacy on CAIR by meeting with its officials, even as its own investigative files contained evidence of CAIR leaders’ ties to Hamas.

Last autumn, FBI field offices began notifying state CAIR chapters that bureau officials could no longer meet with them until CAIR’s national leadership in Washington had addressed issues raised by the HLF trial, according to people with knowledge of the notifications.

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper declined to comment Wednesday when the IPT called for comment. Before hanging up, Hooper said “We’re more than happy to cooperate with legitimate media. But we don’t cooperate with those who promote anti-Muslim bigotry.”

In one letter obtained by IPT News, James E. Finch, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office, canceled a meeting of the local Muslim Community Outreach Program, a state-federal program designed to enlist Muslims in terrorism prevention and investigate reports of civil liberties violations.

“Regrettably, due to circumstances beyond my control, the meeting will be postponed until further notice as a result of the planned participation by the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations,” Finch’s Oct. 8, 2008 letter to Muslim groups in the Oklahoma outreach program said.

Finch made clear the Oklahoma office valued its relationship with local Muslims. He said the stumbling block to further outreach was CAIR’s national leadership.

“[I]f CAIR wishes to pursue an outreach relationship with the FBI, certain issues must be addressed to the satisfaction of the FBI. Unfortunately, these issues cannot be addressed at the local level and must be addressed by the CAIR National Office in Washington, D.C.,” the letter said.

A spokesman for the FBI’s Oklahoma City office referred questions about the letter to the FBI’s national press office. In Washington, FBI spokesman John Miller said, “We’ve certainly been in contact with CAIR chapters” about the un-indicted co-conspirator designation. “The letter speaks for itself.”

Letters with similar wording were sent in other states, people with knowledge of the matter said. It is not known how many letters were issued, but the FBI has had strong working relationships with CAIR chapters in states including Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and Florida.

Hamas was formed in 1987 as the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamic political movement that aims to spread the rule of Shariah, or Islamic law, throughout the world.

A North American branch of the Brotherhood supervised HLF, CAIR and other organizations to build political, financial and public relations support for Hamas, evidence at the HLF trial showed.

The U.S.-based Brotherhood formed a Palestine Committee, headed by Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook, in 1988 during the first intifada uprising in Palestinian territories against Israel. Hamas’s stated policy is for the destruction of Israel.

CAIR co-founders Ahmad and Awad were early active members of the Palestine Committee, evidence showed. Wiretaps recorded the two CAIR leaders participating in strategy meetings of the committee in the 1990s, and both were also on a phone list of its members, the evidence showed.

The first HLF trial in Texas ended in a mistrial in October 2007. In November 2008, the second trial resulted in convictions of five former HLF officials on all counts of providing material support to Hamas.

It is unclear what changed between the first and second HLF trials to make the FBI rescind its policy of outreach to CAIR. The un-indicted co-conspirator designations were made on May 27, 2007 in connection with the first HLF trial. Moreover, much of the evidence linking the CAIR officials to Hamas was aired in an earlier public trial in 2006.

CAIR, however, vigorously challenged the un-indicted co-conspirator designation as a violation of its First and Fifth Amendment rights, accusing the government of “demonization of all things Muslim” in a brief filed in the summer of 2007 with the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

The co-conspirator designation is “particularly insidious and ironic as CAIR is an organization dedicated to fostering acceptance of Muslims in American society and protecting the civil liberties of all Muslim Americans,” CAIR’s brief read.

The government filed a brief on Sept. 4, 2007 opposing CAIR’s filing, arguing the group lacked standing to challenge the co-conspirator designation and that the matter was moot, as the evidence was already entered into the public record. The judge never ruled on CAIR’s request.

The HLF trial showed that CAIR was formed to covertly influence US opinions of the Palestinian conflict and Islam, but without revealing its connections to Hamas.

For example, prosecutors introduced transcripts of wiretaps from a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia of the Palestine Committee, called to order by Ahmad (see page 10 of the hyperlink) and attended by Awad. In that meeting, Ahmad and others discussed the need to create a new political organization seemingly unconnected to Hamas or the Brotherhood.

In one excerpt, (see page 4 of the link) an unidentified male said: “We must form a new organization for activism which will be neutral, because we are placed in a corner, we are place in a corner. It is known who we are, we are marked and I believe there should be a new neutral organization which works on both sides.”

CAIR was founded a year later, in 1994, by Ahmad and Awad. In March 1994, Awad was taped at Miami’s Barry University publicly declaring his support for Hamas: “I am in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO,” Awad said.

A July 30, 1994 agenda for the Palestine Committee, seized by federal agents and introduced at trial, showed that “suggestions to develop the work” of HLF, CAIR and other organizations was on the agenda.

Under the heading “The need for trained resources in the media and political fields,” the agenda said: “No doubt America is the ideal location to train the necessary resources to support the Movement worldwide.”

By 1995, CAIR was conducting public relations work to counter the US detention of Mousa Abu Marzook, the Hamas official and Palestine Committee member who was also head of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US.

A transcript of an August 1995 phone call intercepted by government investigators showed HLF officials Shukri Abu Baker and Ghassan Elashi talking about CAIR’s efforts (see page 12 of the link).

Days before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the FBI raided the offices of Infocom, a Texas internet company connected to HLF. CAIR’s Nihad Awad appeared at a press conference outside Infocom headquarters to denounce what he called an “anti-Muslim witch hunt.”

CAIR remained a vocal player in the public debate after 9/11. It developed relationships with members of Congress. FBI officials frequently attended CAIR fundraising banquets, and CAIR cited such contacts in its own literature and Web site as evidence of its good standing with the government.

Mary Jacoby is an award winning reporter who has worked for the Wall Street Journal, Salon.com, the St. Petersburg Times, Chicago Tribune and Roll Call. She may be reached at writetomaryjacoby@gmail.com

For more on CAIR’s roots and its history of attacking law enforcement investigations and supporting Islamic terrorists, see the IPT’s dossier on the group. Check back at the IPT website tomorrow for a report on CAIR’s consistent refusal to condemn terrorist organizations and its rationalization of suicide bombings.

ENDS article


HERE COMES THE JUDGE(S)

Declaring war on Hollywood and its lies, this soldier, Sgt. Walsh,  says … “But according to then Senator and now President Obama, all I did was air-raid villages and kill innocent civilians.  This is a video I will never forget”
The soldier’s story is also referenced here
“To The Wire”, too, is unimpressed


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Gordon Brown in Davos: Switch off your mobile phone please

January 30, 2009

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30th January, 2009

GORDON DOES HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOUR

At Davos Gordon Brown’s mobile phone went off just as he was speaking. Now I wonder whose timing could have been that bad … er … good?

Hi Gordon, Tony here – hope you’re not doing anything important … I just thought I’d have a word about all those spending commitments you’re making.”

The YouTube site says:

“I don’t remember any other leader being caught out in the same way, but when people’s phones rang during Tony Blair’s speeches he had a stock gag up his sleeve: “If that’s Gordon, tell him I’m not making any spending commitments,” he would say.

Sadly, Brown wouldn’t tell reporters who it was on the line. Any ideas?”



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Blair had “doubts” over Iraq decision – Not Exactly News, Blair bashers

January 30, 2009

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30th January 2009

BLAIR DOUBTS OVER IRAQ – THE NEWS THAT ISN’T (‘NEWS’, that is)

One of the most irritating things about the Blair Bashers of this world – apart from the fact that they are WRONG, but think they are right – is their ignorance. Or perhaps selective memory. Surely it can’t be personal bias, opinion, bad/weak journalism or misplaced schadenfreude? I feel it is more accurate to describe them as ignorant. After all this can hardly be just lazy journalism. And unlike we bloggers, many of these people are PAID for this stuff.

For instance, following The Times prelude to Ginny Dougary’s interview tomorrow, in which Mr Blair says that he has doubts over his Iraq decision, you’d think for all the world that this was NEWS!

And it isn’t only the little bloggers who either twist the truth or simply don’t keep an eye on the facts. Even The Times writer today – Philip Webster is at it. The caption to the picture of soldiers on fire says (NOTE – not soldiers in successful mode) “He now admits to doubts over Iraq”.  This is how the picture appears with caption at The Times.

tblair_iraqsoldiersonfire_times30jan09-henowadmitstodoubtsoverthewariniraq

He now admits to doubts over Iraq

And yet Mr Blair said the same thing in September 2003 at his party conference, a few months after the invasion. Read and listen here.

So it’s hardly news that he had doubts. Wouldn’t we all? He said the same a year or two ago, before he left office (I’ll add the evidence … er  link later).

But the little Bashers now think they have his head on a plate.

What fools.

What foolish, foolish fools!

Bless.



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Spanish courts to probe Israelis on ‘crimes against humanity’

January 30, 2009

Israel News on this upside down world: The judge is acting under a doctrine that allows prosecution in Spain of such an offense or crimes like terrorism or genocide, even if they are alleged to have been committed in another country. “The decision of the Spanish court is delusional, ridiculous, and more than that, outrageous,” Ben-Eliezer told Channel 2. “They are using the courts of the free world to fight those who fight terror. I am not sorry about the decision that I made when I was defense minister to assassinate him. Shehadeh was an arch-murderer. If we hadn’t done this, hundreds of others would have died,” he said.

Barak issued a statement saying, “All of the senior defense officials, from the past and the present, acted correctly in the name of the State of Israel and out of a commitment to defend Israeli citizens.” He said the Spanish decision was particularly disturbing following recent events in the Gaza Strip, during which Hamas’s “true face” had been revealed. The defense minister said he would take all necessary action to defend the officials from the charges and to have those charges annulled.

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29th January, 2009

INTERVENTIONISM – BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

Madrid Court grants motion by Palestinian group to probe several government officials, senior IDF officers for their involvement in 2002 hit on Hamas operative Salah Shehade; which left 14 dead, 100 wounded. Former IDF chiefs Halutz, Yaalon; ministers Ben Eliezer, Dichter named in case

Not quite sure where this is likely to lead.  But somehow I don’t see any Israeli officials turning up voluntarily in a Spanish court.

While Spanish interventionism is spreading its net to catch ‘war criminals’ from other countries accused of attacking a third country, I wonder who else is on Spain’s list?

Hamas leaders?  Hezbollah officials? Iran’s president? President Bush? Former Spanish Prime Minister José Aznar?

You could be getting warmer …

But hang on, what’s this? The Spanish have been checkmated.

Helping the supercilious caring few to bang up such as, (possibly), their own former prime minister sounds sensible, thinks Israel. So Israel will save them the trouble.

Israel says former Spanish PM should stand trial over Belgrade bombing in 1999.

Responding to a Spanish court’s decision to investigate Israeli officials over the assassination of a senior Hamas terrorist, MK Arye Eldad (National Union) on Thursday asked Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz to prosecute former Spanish officials over the 1999 NATO bombing of Belgrade.

Eldad said that the former prime minister, defense minister and chief of staff should stand trial for hundreds of civilians killed in the Serbian capital.

“Israel should put them on trial if the Spanish government does not instruct the court to cancel the charges forthwith,” Eldad said.

It reminds me of a kids’ song (to paraphrase) – “my terrorist’s bigger than your terrorist …”



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