U.K.'s Blair Warns of Need to Confront Bombers' `Evil Ideology'
July 16 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair warned of the need to confront the ``evil ideology'' behind the London bombs that killed 55 people, saying to appease Islamist terrorists would be a ``misunderstanding of catastrophic proportions.''
The terrorists' cause ``is not founded on an injustice,'' Blair said in a speech at the National Policy Forum in London today. ``It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such that it cannot be modified, it cannot be remedied.''
Blair vowed to work with other nations to promote moderate Islam, saying the way to thwart attacks such as last week's London transport bombings is as much about winning a battle of ideas within Islam and outside, as implementing anti-terrorism measures.
The U.K. and other nations should try to defeat terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda ``by the power of argument and debate,'' Blair said. ``That means not just arguing against their terrorism but also against their politics.''
Countering the view that the war in Iraq has made terrorist attacks more likely, Blair said the terrorists would ``use any issue that is a matter of dissent within our democracy'' to perpetrate their attacks.
``If it is Iraq that motivates them, why is it the same ideology that is killing Iraqis now?'' Blair said in a televised speech. ``If the plight of the Palestinians is what motivates them, why every time Israel and Palestine are making progress, do they commit another atrocity?'' he said.
Elimination of Israel
``What we are confronting is an evil ideology,'' Blair said. ``They demand the elimination of Israel, the withdrawal of all westerners from Muslim states'' and ``the establishment of a Taliban state on the way to one caliphate of all Muslim nations.''
More than a million people demonstrated in London against the Iraq war in 2003, and polls show that a majority of Britons now think the invasion was a mistake.
Charles Kennedy, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats, said July 12 that Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush are to blame if people link the July 7 bombings on London, the deadliest since World War II, with the Iraq war. He cited intelligence advice given to Blair before the Iraq invasion warning that war would increase the threat of terrorism.
The U.K. government is planning new laws to criminalize providing training for terrorists and describing suicide bombers as ``martyrs,'' Charles Clarke said in a letter to opposition politicians yesterday.
Attacks Justified?
The Arab world has often had a ``permissive attitude'' toward suicide bombings in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, said Jon Alterman, a former U.S. State Department adviser on the Middle East, on July 14. That's changed during the past year, as terrorists have killed Iraqi civilians and police at a rate of more than 800 per month, according to Iraqi figures reported the same day in the New York Times.
Support for suicide bombings has declined in five mainly Muslim countries during the past two years, according to a survey carried out before Britons were hit last week with the first such attacks on their soil.
In Turkey, Morocco and Indonesia, 15 percent or fewer of those questioned said such violence is justified as a defense of Islam, the Pew Global Attitudes Project survey found, a decline in all three countries.
Pakistani Muslims' support for suicide bombing dropped to 25 percent from 41 percent last year, and in Lebanon, 39 percent regard such terror attacks as sometimes justified, a decline from 73 percent who expressed that view in 2002.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Rodrigo Davies in London at rdavies13@bloomberg.net. |
