Tony Blair to say battle against Islamic extremism is paramount

Patrick Wintour, political editor The Guardian, Wednesday 23 April 2014

Former PM, who supported Egyptian military's overthrow of democratically elected government, to urge west to take sides

Tony Blair will say: 'The threat of radical Islam … is destabilising communities and even nations.' Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Tony Blair will warn the west it needs to take sides in the Middle East and move the battle against Islamist extremism to the top of the political agenda.

In a speech to Bloomberg in London on Wednesday, the former Labour prime minister will say: "The important point for western opinion is that this is a struggle with two sides. So when we look at the Middle East and beyond it to Pakistan or Iran and elsewhere, it isn't just a vast unfathomable mess with no end in sight and no one worthy of our support. It is in fact a struggle in which our own strategic interests are intimately involved; where there are indeed people we should support and who, ironically, are probably in the majority if only that majority were mobilised, organised and helped.

"But what is absolutely necessary is that we first liberate ourselves from our own attitude. We have to take sides. We have to stop treating each country on the basis of whatever seems to make for the easiest life for us at any one time. We have to have an approach to the region that is coherent and sees it as a whole. And above all, we have to commit. We have to engage".

He will accept engagement comes at a cost, admitting there is no commitment that doesn't mean taking a risk.

His aides said the keynote speech was not a call for revolution across the region, but to recognise that the west cannot stand aside from struggles such as the one in Syria.

Blair caused controversy when he sided with the Egyptian military's overthrow of the democratically elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his intervention in Iraq in 2003 has been cited as one reason why the west has refused to intervene more in the three-year Syrian war.

Blair will warn: "The threat of this radical Islam is not abating. It is growing. It is spreading across the world. It is destabilising communities and even nations. It is undermining the possibility of peaceful co-existence in an era of globalisation. And in the face of this threat we seem curiously reluctant to acknowledge it and powerless to counter it effectively".

In a clear reference to Saudi Arabia, he will say: "It is absurd to spend billions of dollars on security arrangements and on defence to protect ourselves against the consequences of an ideology that is being advocated in the formal and informal school systems and in civic institutions of the very countries with whom we have intimate security and defence relationships."

He claims some of these countries want to break out of this ideology, but need the west to make it a core part of the international dialogue in order to force the necessary change within their own societies.

Blair will be unrepentant about his apparent rejection of democracy in Egypt, saying the "Muslim Brotherhood government was not simply a bad government. It was systematically taking over the traditions and institutions of the country."

He will claim the revolt of 30 June 2013 led by the army was "not an ordinary protest. It was the absolutely necessary rescue of a nation. We should support the new government and help."

He will add that this does not mean strong criticism of the death sentence on 500 Egyptians, but does require showing "some sensitivity to the fact that over 400 police officers have suffered violent deaths and several hundred soldiers been killed".

Across the Middle East, he will say, there is one essential struggle between pluralistic societies and open economies, where the attitudes and patterns of globalisation are embraced; and those who want to impose an ideology born out of a belief that there is one proper religion and one proper view of it, and that this view should exclusively determine the nature of society and the political economy.

Tony Blair to say battle against Islamic extremism is paramount | Politics | The Guardian

Tensions between Australian Defence League and Muslim community reach violent new heights

By Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop

Australian Defence League (ADL) Anti-Sharia Law Rally in Sydney 30 July 2011.

Video: Inside the far-right group spreading fear through Muslim communities (7.30)

Map: NSW

Police and ASIO are scrambling to defuse serious tensions between Australian far-right groups and Islamist extremists, which have reached unprecedented heights in recent weeks with death threats and an apparent attempted murder.

In the most serious case, up to eight gunshots were fired into the Sydney home of a former leader of an anti-Islamic hate group earlier this month.

The former western Sydney president of the Australian Defence League (ADL), Nathan Abela, claims he commando-rolled through his living room to avoid being hit by up to eight bullets fired into his Greystanes home late on April 3.

Police believe the shooting was part of a backlash against the ADL, a registered not-for-profit organisation which incites its followers to violence and has in recent months escalated a vicious hate campaign against Australian Muslims.

The group's members and followers have been stalking and photographing Muslim women on public transport, spraying invective at Muslims on Sydney streets and on social media, displaying anti-Islamic posters outside mosques and even threatening to blow up an Islamic school.

The ADL was established in 2009 as an offshoot of the violent English Defence League, the UK's most provocative street movement in decades.

The Australian group has fewer than 30 paid members, but its Facebook page attracted more than 12,000 followers before it was shut down earlier this month.

One of its leaders is former soldier Ralph Cerminara, an IT technician by day who has spent more than three years as the national president of the ADL and claims to have support from within the Australian Defence Force.

Mr Cerminara told the ABC's 7.30 program the group's aim was to have Islam banned and to "defend Australia's culture and Australia's people at all costs".

A recent post from Mr Cerminara's Facebook account to his followers was even more threatening:

"I am calling for the end of Islam in our country and hopefully the world.

"If Muslims have to die then so be it. It is us against them."

In recent weeks, Mr Cerminara ratcheted up tensions with Sydney's Muslim community, urging ADL followers to take photographs of Muslim women in public and post them online.

Several women in hijabs and burqas discovered they had been followed, photographed and subjected to ridicule on Facebook.

A mother of three who was photographed on the morning train to work and then humiliated in a series of vile Facebook posts told 7.30 she has been forced to take stress leave from work and seek counselling for panic attacks.

Mr Cerminara makes no apologies for the personal attacks and public ridicule, telling 7.30: "If that's the way it has to happen, then so be it".

Photo: Ralph Cerminara is one of the leaders of the Australian Defence League. (ABC)

"They are putting that hijab on themselves, the same as a person would be putting a satanic star around their neck," he said.

"We know what they stand for by putting that on."

But Australia's Grand Mufti, Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, says the ADL is trying to "explode society".

"Organisations created in the name of defending Australia want to start a fire in all Australia," he told followers in a recent sermon at Granville Town Hall.

"They deal with the most precious thing a human being has and that is his beliefs."

War of words escalates into shooting

Two months ago, Mr Cerminara expanded the ADL's reach by appointing 24-year-old demolition worker Nathan Abela as the group's western Sydney president.

Abela took to the role with vigour and quickly gained a reputation within Sydney's Muslim community, uploading a series of videos on YouTube of himself preaching, handing out anti-Islamic pamphlets and filming Muslim sites.

It was a video filmed at Australia's biggest Islamic school at Greenacre that rattled the Muslim community and caused police to alert the NSW counter-terrorism squad and ASIO.

In the video posted on YouTube and Facebook, Abela accused the Melek Fahd Islamic School of locking up women. The ADL's Facebook followers suggested the school was a terrorist safe house that should be bombed or burned down.

The actions fuelled an online war of words with Sydney's Muslim extremist community, which escalated in the lead-up to the shooting at Abela's home.

Just days before the shooting, a Sydney man known as Abu Bakr posted a video on YouTube accusing Abela of "making yourself a clear target for the Muslims out there".

"Either you will accept Islam as your salvation, or you will die by the sword," he said in the video, which has since been removed.

Police under pressure to take action

Police are investigating the shooting and continuing death threats against Abela and Mr Cerminara, but have been under pressure from the Muslim community to take action against the Australian Defence League.

Photo: The Australian Defence League is calling for Islam to be banned in Australia. (ABC)

NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas assures a large investigation is continuing into the ADL's actions online and its hate campaign against Muslim women.

"We will not tolerate it and we will be there to do something about it," Mr Kaldas told a community meeting last week.

"There's also some legal advice that we need to get. Some of the offences we can't charge until approval is given by the Attorney-General's Department and that will be pursued."

Late last week, Abela was charged with a number of offences, including trespassing, using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend, and hindering the investigation into the shooting at his house.

The Royal Australian Navy has carried out a separate investigation into the Australian Defence League after reports emerged that some sailors engaged in Operation Sovereign Borders had been posting anti-Islamic comments on social media.

One Navy member who was under investigation had responded to a Facebook post critical of asylum seekers, from someone who claimed to be an ADL member, that he was "about to head out today to deal with these f-----s".

The Navy announced this month that while none of its serving personnel had been found to be members of the ADL, several sailors had been dismissed for inappropriate use of social media.

Tensions between Australian Defence League and Muslim community reach violent new heights - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The deniers club: bowing to Turkey and Sri Lanka

By Simon Tatz

Photo: Bob Carr visits a school in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2012. (AFP Photo: Lakruwan Wanniarachchi)

The 'Israel lobby' is second tier compared to the Turks and Sri Lankans, who wield significant sway over Australia's domestic and foreign policy, writes Simon Tatz.

A tweeter joked that if the Israel lobby in Australia was so influential, they would have gotten Bob Carr upgraded to first class. This was in reference to the revelations by Labor's former foreign minister in his tell-all diary that it was demeaning flying business class, and that the Israel lobby had undue influence over the Gillard government.

The fascinating aspect to Bob Carr's self-serving attack on his former prime minister and the so-called Israel lobby is that Carr wilfully ignores that there are other powerful lobbyists influencing government decisions - the Turkish and Sri Lankan governments.

As a staffer in the Labor Party for more than a decade, I've experienced lobbyists of all persuasions. I have sat in meetings with lobbyists representing every manner of vested interest, including this amorphous and apparently all-powerful 'Israel lobby', and it seems to me they are second tier compared to the Turks and Sri Lankans, who wield significant sway over Australia's domestic and foreign policy.

For a century, Turkish governments have been denying the genocide of the Armenian people at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. That the genocide took place is a historically irrefutable fact, yet the Turks have waged a world-wide campaign of intimidation to suppress and deny the massacre of one-and-a-half million Armenians. The Turks have achieved perverse 'successes' by influencing Australian governments because of our attachment to Gallipoli. It is a matter of record that ANZAC troops taken prisoner during the Gallipoli campaign bore witness to the Armenian genocide. To deny the Armenian genocide is, in effect, to accuse Australian and New Zealand survivors of the bloody Gallipoli landing of lying and of fabricating history. The eyewitness evidence of Australian soldiers is held by the Australian War Memorial, who rather oddly cannot find room to display it in their public galleries.

I'm not accusing the Australian War Memorial of deliberately hiding the evidence of Turkish atrocities during World War I, although federal governments are so obsessed with the symbolism associated with Gallipoli, especially as we approach the centenary celebrations, that they will do anything not to upset the Turkish government. Whatever else one may think of NSW MP Fred Nile or Premier Barry O'Farrell, they have spoken out against the threats by Turkey and showed far more courage than their federal counterparts.

When it comes to wielding political influence, the silence of Australian politicians in confronting Turkey is staggering. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, "for the second consecutive year, Turkey was the world's leading jailer of journalists". There is little press freedom in Turkey, especially when it comes to the sensitive issue of the Armenian genocide.

I know from personal experience the lengths some Turkish sympathisers will go to silence their critics. On August 21, 2013, ABC correspondent Michael Brissenden produced a very powerful report (for 7.30 and PM) on how the Turkish government is using the centenary celebrations at Gallipoli to shut down criticism of the Armenian genocide. Following the comments of some courageous NSW politicians, the Turkish Government has threatened to ban any outspoken politicians from attending the commemoration in Gallipoli in 2015.

My father, Professor Colin Tatz, a renowned genocide scholar, appeared as part of Brissenden's report. Following the ABC's broadcast, the Turkish 'lobby' went into overdrive. I understand that they contacted the ABC and questioned the veracity of the story and the qualifications of those interviewed. For the record, Colin Tatz founded the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is the author of With Intent To Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide. My family has been subject to online attacks by people denying Turkish atrocities and I received intimidating telephone calls.

Federal members of Parliament have rarely voiced any concern about the Turkish Government threatening to ban anyone critical of them from attending Gallipoli celebrations, nor has the Federal Government followed the lead of NSW and passed a motion officially recognising the Armenian genocide. Treasurer Joe Hockey, who has Armenian heritage, Malcolm Turnbull and Michael Danby have voiced their support for such a motion, as have others, but not the Parliament. As the ABC noted:

Around the world Turkish efforts to prevent any official recognition of genocide have been remarkably successful. Only 21 countries have passed a resolution to that effect. The British government and the United States government have not, although 43 US states have, and neither has the Australian Government.

Heaven forbid that we should upset our Turkish friends as we work together to commemorate our fallen diggers.

The Sri Lankans have exerted influence too. While not taking sides or passing judgement on the Sri Lankan civil war, there is credible evidence of war crimes and massacres. The 'Report of the Advisory panel of experts on accountability in Sri Lanka Allegations', presented to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, certainly supports the view that an independent investigation of alleged war crimes and human rights violations is warranted.

While some world leaders have supported the UN's call for an investigation of the alleged atrocities, Bob Carr and Julie Bishop don't appear to share this view. For their own political agenda - refusing the asylum claims of Tamils arriving here by boat by saying they are economic refugees - Labor and Liberal have not supported independent investigations of the Sri Lankan civil war.

In my opinion, certain Australian federal ministers have entered the deniers club when it comes to Turkey and Sri Lanka. It is a bewildering that any Australian politician would deny acts of genocide or claims of atrocities to further their own domestic political agendas. To me, this is an example of political influence at work.   

The last word belongs to Bob Carr. In a speech to the NSW Parliament in 1997, then Premier Carr said: "The Armenian people are right to insist that this great crime against their people, their culture and the universal rights of humankind must be acknowledged." In February 2013, as minister for foreign affairs, Senator Bob Carr told the Lowy Institute that "as a Government we don't take a stand on this historical dispute".

If Bob Carr wants to honestly discuss how foreign governments influence Australian policy, he should explain whether his denial of the Armenian genocide was the result of the "Turkish lobby".

Simon Tatz was chief of staff to the minister for higher education and regional communications in the Gillard-Rudd government. View his full profile here.

The deniers club: bowing to Turkey and Sri Lanka - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)