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Petra Marquardt-Bigman is a German/Israel citizen with a Ph.D. in contemporary history with a focus on European public opinion relating to the Middle East, Islamic Terrorism, the US and Israel.
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By Petra Marquardt-Bigman
January 15, 2007
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With books discussing "Londonistan" or "Eurabia", it may be time to consider British Prime Minister Tony Blair a "martyr". He is certainly suffering for his convictions, which have won him as much derision at home as they have garnered admiration in Israel and the US. But Israelis and Americans cannot make up for the Prime Minister's plummeting popularity at home, and the Labour Party has come to view Blair as a political liability and forced him to promise that he would step down this year.
Yet, Blair is clearly unrepentant, and obviously resolved to be irrepressible: his resolutions for the new year -- and the foreseeable future -- are laid out in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs in an ambitious agenda to win what he describes as a "Battle for Global Values".
Obviously, the fact that Blair did have to promise that he would step down illustrates that his "battle for global values" is a rather unpopular cause. Indeed, Blair himself is the first to acknowledge that: "In any struggle, the first challenge is to accurately perceive the nature of what is being fought over, and here we have a long way to go. It is almost incredible to me that so much Western opinion appears to buy the idea that the emergence of this global terrorism is somehow our fault." As he adds with a good measure of sarcasm: "to give credit where it is due, the extremists play our own media with a shrewdness that would be the envy of many a political party."
While Blair does not hesitate to clearly spell out that the "extremists" are Islamic extremists, he rejects the notion that we are confronted with a "clash of civilizations" as described by Samuel Huntington. Instead, he argues that "it is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence -- between optimism and hope, on the one hand, and pessimism and fear, on the other."
In Blair's view, Islamic extremists are resolved to fight not just the West, but all those "who believe in religious tolerance, in openness to others, in democracy, in liberty, and in human rights administered by secular courts."
Going beyond the focus on security emphasized in George Bush's "war on terror", Blair argues that "Islamist terrorism will not be defeated until we confront not just the methods of the extremists but also their ideas. I do not mean just telling them that terrorist activity is wrong. I mean telling them that their attitude toward the United States is absurd, that their concept of governance is prefeudal, that their positions on women and other faiths are reactionary. We must reject not just their barbaric acts but also their false sense of grievance against the West, their attempt to persuade us that it is others and not they themselves who are responsible for their violence."
In Blair's analysis, the "false sense of grievance against the West" is central, and he emphasizes also elsewhere in the text that "Islamist extremism's whole strategy is based on a presumed sense of grievance." However, by associating this motivation with extremism, he glosses over the fact that this "sense of grievance" is actually shared by many in the Muslim world, as are most of the other notions that Blair describes as extremist.
Therefore, extremism as defined by Blair is not really a minority position among Muslims, and this is well documented by various opinion polls and surveys. Consider, for example, a Pew Research Center survey from 2003, which revealed that Osama bin Laden was regarded as somebody who could be trusted to "do the right thing regarding world affairs" by solid majorities in the Palestinian Authority, Indonesia and Jordan, and nearly half of the respondents in Morocco and Pakistan.
Similarly, just from reading the Guardian, it becomes clear that the views expressed recently by a Jordanian academics are quite mainstream in the Middle East: "In the Arab world where I live, we usually refer to both Hamas and Hizbullah as 'national liberation movements'"; and therefore, "the US, Britain, Israel and the rest of the purportedly enlightened modern world cannot expect democracies in the Arab world to operate on western terms."
While Blair's analysis that Islamic extremists are resolved to fight all those "who believe in religious tolerance, in openness to others, in democracy, in liberty, and in human rights administered by secular courts" may be correct, his assumption that the Islamic world could be pacified if it was given better opportunities to adopt these values may be mistaken. Islamic extremists are no fringe group, they enjoy considerable popular support, and neither the extremists nor their supporters seem to want any of Blair's "global values".
In this context it may be instructive to consider Blair's own view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "the terrorists' aim is not to encourage the creation of a Palestine living side by side with Israel... They fight not for the coming into being of a Palestinian state but for the going out of being of an Israeli state." Again it has to be noted that the terrorists are not an isolated fringe group, and recent poll data show that barely 47 percent of Palestinians favor a two-state solution; at the same time, some 48 percent support suicide attacks against Israeli civilians and about 43 percent support "military operations" against Israel.
Yet, Blair still repeats the popular Mideast mantra: "We need to reenergize the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians . . . Its significance for the broader issue of the Middle East and for the battle within Islam goes beyond correcting the plight of the Palestinians. A settlement would be the living, visible proof that the region and the world can accommodate different faiths and cultures. It would not only silence reactionary Islam's most effective rallying call but fatally undermine its basic ideology."
Obviously, this is no more than wishful thinking, because "reactionary Islam's most effective rallying call" -- as documented in the Hamas Charter -- is the call for the "liberation" of ALL of historic Palestine, and the basic tenets of Islamist ideology rest on the notion that any hardship and humiliation experienced by Muslims is caused by the "Crusaders" of the West and the machinations described in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which Muslims are called upon to confront with unwavering religious fervor and devotion.
It would thus seem doubtful that one can realistically hope for a meaningful peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that would help anytime soon to advance Tony Blair's "global values". While a world in which the values advocated by Blair prevail might indeed be a better place, too few seem willing to stand up and fight for these values, and it may not be a coincidence that also too few seem willing to realize that in the Middle East, Israel is the only country that cherishes these values.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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