My eyes simply glazed over listening to one nouveau conservative, so in desperation to see something of interest while plodding on my stationary exercise bike I flipped to Christiane Amanpour’s interview of Tony Blair. He still looks like Howdy Doody of kiddy television fame but I actually liked him and what he had to say about 9/11. It was particularly satisfying because in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 jihad he held the Koran in his hand and called it Islam the….you guessed it.

Yesterday, however, he was more circumspect:

“before 9/11, I did not fully grasp how deep this ideological movement is. … [T]his is actually more like the phenomenon of revolutionary communism. It’s the religious or cultural equivalent of it, and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long, and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism, but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.”

“I think a lot of people don’t understand that this is a generational-long struggle,” he added.

When Amanpour (who is really a terrific interviewer unlike the spitting and hissing Chris Matthews, or the dullard Charlie Rose) asked about Cheney, his answer was thoughtful:

“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. In other words, he thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We’re coming after you, so change or be changed.”

The vice president, he continued,

“was always absolutely hard-line on these things. … His world view was that the world had to be remade after September the 11^th….You can’t dismiss that Cheney view and say that’s stupid,” he said. “It’s not. It may require amendment, you may disagree with it but –”

And on Iran and nuclear power, he was almost Thatcheresque: Blair said that if he were still a “decision maker” he “wouldn’t take the risk” of letting Iran acquire a nuclear weapons capability.

“So, what would you do?” Amanpour asked.

“I would tell them they can’t have it, and if necessary, they will be confronted with stronger sanctions and diplomacy. But if that fails, I’m not taking any option off the table,” he said.

“So, you see a military possibility against Iran?” Amanpour asked.

“I don’t want to see it,” Blair said, “but I think you cannot exclude it because the primary objective has got to be to prevent the nuclear weapon.”

Now this is surely welcome after having read Robert Spencer on Blair in JihadWatch:

Tony Blair: “I regularly read the Koran, practically every day”; Muhammad “an enormously civilizing force”

I regularly read the Qur’an myself — practically every day. Nothing wrong with that. But does Blair ever read the uncomfortable bits? The wife-beating verse (4:34)? The verse enjoining warfare against and the subjugation of Jews and Christians (9:29)? The “verse of the sword” and other verses that exhort Muslims to slay unbelievers wherever they’re found (9:5, 4:89, 4:91, 2:190-193)? The verse saying the Jews and Christians are under Allah’s curse (9:30)? The verse that says that unbelievers are the most vile of created beings (98:6)? The verse enjoining the beheading of unbelievers (47:4)? The verse exhorting Muslims to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah (8:60)?

If he does read these passages, what does he think of them? Does he gloss over them and tell himself that the Book of Deuteronomy has some tough passages also? Or does he reflect on the relative paucity of Deuteronomy-inspired terrorists worldwide, as compared to the number of Qur’an-inspired terrorists worldwide? Does he ask his Muslim friends about these verses?

No answers to these questions are likely to be forthcoming from Mr. Blair, and more’s the pity. For it shows that his attachment to the Qur’an is just pandering, just window dressing, and is agenda-driven, rather than an honest attempt to understand what motivates Islamic jihad terrorism. And so instead of shining some light on what we’re dealing with, Blair has just added to the fog.

Well, has the fog lifted a tad?

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.

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About the author

Ruth S. King
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ruth King is a freelance writer. She has written a book and articles on gardening, and also writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of Americans for a Safe Israel.