Radical Islam Has Outmanoeuvred West, Says Blair
THE TELEGRAPH: Western democracies have been "outspent, outmanoeuvred and out-strategised" by violent Islamist extremists, Tony Blair has claimed.

In a speech in New York, the former prime minister said that warnings over the past week of terrorist plots against Europe should remind people that they remained under threat.

Mr Blair said a "narrative" that Muslims were under attack from the US and its allies, who acted out of support for Israel, had been allowed to take hold, aided by "websites and blogs".

A fresh confrontation was needed because it would be impossible to defeat extremism "without defeating the narrative that nurtures it", he said.

"The practitioners of extremism are small in number. The adherents of the narrative stretch far broader into parts of mainstream thinking," Mr Blair told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"It is a narrative that now has vast numbers of assembled websites, blogs and organisations."

Mr Blair said it was "absurd" that some people were surprised at how powerful Islamist extremist groups were, given the amount of funding they received and indoctrination they spread.

"Measure, over the years, the paucity of our counter-attack in the name of peaceful coexistence," he said. "We have been outspent, outmanoeuvred and out-strategised." >>> Jon Swaine in New York | Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Blair said that we can't defeat radical Islam until we defeat the narrative that nurtures it. That's totally right. And what is that narrative that nurtures it? The Qur'an, of course. So let the battle commence. – © Mark

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How To Defeat The Global Jihadists
STANDPOINT.ONLINE: I have recently spent time talking with senior Pentagon officials and others involved in counter-terrorism. Their intellectual seriousness, and the global scope of their concerns, are strikingly different from those of their British counterparts, who are obsessed with “community cohesion” and the “radicalisation” of young Muslims. On these issues, the views of the non-Muslim majority population are largely ignored — except as potential “Islamophobes” with little or no say in the matter.

In the United States, by contrast, the Senate committee on homeland security heard evidence in April about the likely effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on Washington DC. The chairman, Senator Joe Lieberman, said, “The scenarios we discuss today are very hard for us to contemplate, and so emotionally traumatic and unsettling that it is tempting to push them aside.”

What was Lieberman talking about? A 10-kiloton bomb left in a truck by the White House would kill about 100,000 people and erase a two-mile radius of mainly federal buildings downtown. Most casualties would be burn victims, the majority of them African-Americans who work for the federal government. About 95 per cent of them would die an agonising death, because current capacity to treat such cases is limited to about 1,500. Since the winds blow west to east, the ensuing radioactive plume would drift towards the poor black neighbourhoods of the capital’s South East where there is only one hospital. Lieberman concluded, “Now is the time to have this difficult convers­ation, to ask the tough questions, and then to get answers as best we can.” One wonders what preparations for such a nightmare scenario are being made here in Britain. Are our parliamentarians asking these questions and enabling us to have this conversation? How To Defeat The Global Jihadists >>> By Michael Burleigh | June 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardcover – USA)