Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, recently gave a historic speech to the LOS ANGELES WORLD AFFAIRS COUNCIL IN AUGUST 2006. The Prime Minister Tony Blair has delivered a major foreign policy speech on the Middle East to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. In the speech he called for a ‘complete renaissance’ on foreign policy to combat ‘Reactionary Islam’.
In many respects, Tony Blair’s speech is comparable to the equally great and historic speech made by Sir Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, USA in 1946, in the presence of American President Truman, making out a strong case for a united alliance against the then rising tide of Stalinist brand of International Communism. The substance of Churchill’s Fulton Message, embellished with many typical rhetorical flourishes, was that From Stetting in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent of Europe and we will not see that removed in our lifetime. Churchill also prophetically declared that peace and democracy in the post-war world could no longer be sustained by the three great powers of the wartime alliance performing as an equal trinity and offering the world a triangular leadership. He did not believe that the Russians under Stalin wanted war, but he did think that their desire was for the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. This could be resisted without war only by America and Briton working ever more closely together.
Churchill’s core message was hard and clear. To quote the words of Roy Jenkins, the eminent biographer of Winston Churchill and former British Home Secretary and Chancellor of the exchequer: Whether or not it was given that name, a Western Alliance was necessary, and there should no longer be any pretence that the leading members of the United Nations stood in equally close relationship with each other. Within a very few years, of course, this became settled American and British policy, gracefully accepted by the non-communist countries of Europe, not only by the core of France, Benelux and Italy but by others from Norway to Turkey and from Greece to Portugal. Truman and Marshall, Bevin and Acheson, achieved their greatest fame by being the architects of NATO, the alliance which through forty years of cold war, achieved its central objective while never firing a shot.
Tony Blair has made an impassioned plea to the effect that there is an urgent need for clearer thinking, a decided and more determined approach to effectively throw out the savage forces of global Islamic terrorism throughout the world. I fully endorse the view of my international civil-servant and scholar-friend Dr Kalyana Raman who says: Tony Blair may be speaking with tongue-in-cheek; but he is very close to the reality. The British colonial regime vacated India and left the seeds of jihadi terror by creating a jihadistan misnamed Pakistan. It has been a search for Hindustan ever since.
Let me not stand between you and Tony Blair who seems to have a clearer picture of the state of the polity in India than our suavely impotent Dr.Manmohan Singh and many of his Terrorist Islam-embracing, Christianity-coveting and Hindu-hating Cabinet Ministers. Many Indian pundits, op-ed writers, columnists and other Osama Bin Ladens in the pseudo-secular mafia of English mass media in India, including all the main English newspapers (excepting a few!!) have either completely ignored or not taken due note of Tony Blair’s historic speech at Log Angeles on the growing menace of Global Islamic terrorism. This is what Tony Blair said.
Overnight, the news came through that as well as continuing conflict in the Lebanon, Britain’s Armed Forces suffered losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. It brings home yet again the extraordinary courage and commitment of our armed forces who risk their lives and in some cases tragically lose them, defending our country’s security and that of the wider world. These are people of whom we should be very proud. I know the US has suffered heavy losses too in Iraq and in Afghanistan. We should never forget how much we owe these people, how great their bravery, and their sacrifice. I planned the basis of this speech several weeks ago. The crisis in the Lebanon has not changed its thesis. It has brought it into sharp relief’. The purpose of the provocation that began the conflict was clear. It was to create chaos, division and bloodshed, to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed, not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it. We must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us. There is an ARC OF EXTREMISM now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region. To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation, that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian; Arab and Western; wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other. My argument to you today is this: we will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are evenhanded, fair and just in our application of those values to the world.
What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future. It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values.
Whatever the outward manifestation at any one time – in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iraq and add to that in Afghanistan, in Kashmir, in a host of other nations including now some in Africa – it is a global fight about global values; it is about modernization, within Islam and outside of it; it is about whether our value system can be shown to be sufficiently robust, true, principled and appealing that it beats theirs. Islamist extremism’s whole strategy is based on a presumed sense of grievance that can motivate people to divide against each other. Our answer has to be a set of values strong enough to unite people with each other. This is not just about security or military tactics. It is about hearts and minds about inspiring people, persuading them, showing them what our values at their best stand for.
I don’t think that Dr. Manmohan Singh or his Defence Minister or his Home Minister will ever come forward openly to pay tribute to the great officers and men of the Indian Army laying down their lives fighting against Islamic terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir for fear of offending the peace loving Jihadistan alias Pakistan.
Dr. Manmohan Singh and his anti-Nation, anti-Hindu and anti-Sanatana Dharma UPA Government would Soniashly dismiss without much ado the above bitingly relevant words of Tony Blair as ‘highly communal’, RSS-like, highly saffronized and dangerously non-secular. We have a faltering, failing, dithering and shivering Prime Minister whose strings are pulled by the coldly calculating, manipulative, power-without-responsibility Italian Supremo. She has got all the political advantages which Alberto Fujimori had in Peru. To crown it all, we have a quaking irresponsible Central Government committed to the policy of promotion of Jihadic terrorism in India under the politically contrived umbrella of continuance of Peace Talks with Jihadic Pakistan even while embracing with never-ending passion the voluptuously Congress call-girl of Pseudo-secularism. All Muslims are not terrorists; however all terrorists are Muslims. This is not an accident. According to Tony Blair (highly communal and saffronized!!) this is part of a globally organized and designed net-work of Islamic terrorism.
May I secularly request our effete, neutral between neutrals Prime Minister, to convene an urgent Cabinet Meeting to depute three of his Islamic cabinet Ministers? Arjun Singh, Ram Vilas Paswan and Antulay?to go on an urgent mission to the Mecca of Islamic Jurisprudence in India, Dar-Ul-Uloom, Deoband,in UP to issue an immediate Fatwa against Tony Blair for having made that politically wicked speech supporting the Kafir Cause of saffronized Santana Dharma in Kashmir!!
M. V. Kamath who is no less senior as a journalist than Harish Khare(!!!) has recently written an article titled Sickening ‘Secular’ Press in which he has observed as follows: We have to thank our secularists for the situation that we find ourselves in now. There is something sick about our secular leaders and secular press. And it has taken The Hindu and Harish Khare to point that out!! In my view this whole process has taken forty-nine years. Strange indeed are the ways of pseudo-secularism if not pseudo-jouranalism!!!
Neville Chamberlain was brought down by his Cabinet colleague L S Amery in the House of Commons in May 1940 by quoting the killing words of Cromwell when he dismissed the Long Parliament:
You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of GOD, go!
There is no one in the UPA Government or in the Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha today who can speak the same words to our Prime Minister. I therefore arrogate to myself the democratic privilege of quoting the above words to our voluntarily or involuntarily deaf, dumb is not blind Prime Minister.
(The writer is a retired IAS officer)
http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/0708ss1.htm
