authorities on three continents
In a speech in central London on Saturday, Blair said authorities were facing an "evil ideology" in their struggle against Islamic terrorism.
"The greatest danger is that we fail to face up to the nature of the threat that we're dealing with," he said. "And what we are confronting here is an evil ideology.... It is a battle of ideas, of hearts and of minds, both within Islam and outside it."William J. Kole/AP/NationalPost-canada.com 16.Jul.05
Is that too nit-picky? I think it's central. We're asked to perceive Islam as the miniaturized battleground of what we're supposed to be viewing as a "clash of civilizations" - that Islam is the scene of that clash, sort of pretty much, that there are good and bad Muslims, and that the "war on terror" is not a war against Islam itself exactly, but against an evil ideology that festers within it, to the detriment of good Muslims everywhere, and the outrage of the civilized world.
Why isn't that same division makeable in Christianity and Judaism? Can't there be evil there too? Can't there be some kind of supremacy of the elect that justifies the impersonal slaughter of innocents in those religions too? Isn't there? Isn't that what this is really?
The assumption behind Blair's phrase is no there can't, this isn't.
Islam must clean its own house of this violent ideology, with our increasingly violent support. Our houses are clean already.
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In a related bit, James Wolcott asks the same question many of us have pondered about the boyish and cheerful-seeming Tony Blair.
Why?
Why is he so easily satirized as Bush's poodle? Why was he so rabidly pro-invasion and so unashamedly unapologetic for the odometer-like body count in Iraq?
The answer seems to be that he isn't Bush's poodle at all, since Bush himself is down on all fours and barking for approval. From whom is the more accurate, the real question.
And with that I'm lashing the wheel.
