Europe's Intolerable "Tolerance"

by Samuel Westrop • June 18, 2015 at 5:00 am

For Tony Blair and European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR), "tolerance" seems not to be freedom of expression, but an Orwellian standard of behaviour to be rigidly enforced and regulated by government, in which group rights trump individual rights.
Under government-enforced "tolerance," extremists would flourish, honest critics would be silenced, freedom of expression would be criminalized, and, in deference to "groups," the individual would lose his right to be an individual.
In a recent case before London's High Court, a judge ruled that an illegal immigrant who beat his own son should be forgiven because of the "cultural context." In other words, the law should protect only white children; the ruling implicitly condones the beating of minority children -- all in the name of diversity and tolerance.
Along with criminalizing views that the ECTR deems intolerable, Blair's group also advocates that, "The Government shall ensure that public broadcasting stations will devote a prescribed percentage of their programmes to promoting a climate of tolerance."

Tony Blair -- enforcer of European "tolerance"?

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has accepted an invitation to become chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR). The ECTR boasts an advisory board comprising a dozen European presidents and prime ministers. It describes itself as a non-governmental body that "fosters understanding and tolerance among peoples of various ethnic origin; educates on techniques of reconciliation; facilitates post-conflict social apprehensions; monitors chauvinistic behaviours, proposes protolerance initiatives and legal solutions."

Behind all this jargon, Blair and the ECTR claim to promote religious belief and dialogue as a means to challenge hate speech and extremism. Writing in The Times, Blair and ECTR President Moshe Kantor state:

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Erdogan & Co.: Bad News for Jihadists

by Burak Bekdil • June 18, 2015 at 4:00 am

Turkey's recent elections mean, among other things, that Erdogan, Davutoglu & Co.'s dreams of a new Middle East, built on a strictly pan-Islamist ummah [Muslim community] population and subservient to a supremacist Turkish empire, are, for some unknown time, over.

Why do bad things always happen to them? At right, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; at left, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

When more than 55 million Turks voted on June 7, they did not only vote to deprive President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the worse-than-Putinesque powers he had long been campaigning for; they also said a democratic "No" to his Islamist foreign policy ambitions.

Erdogan, in the next few years, will probably be too distracted by his own efforts to re-establish his totalitarian reign to have the energy to pursue any ambitions to build the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas-type of neighborhood he seems to be craving: a neo-Ottoman/Turkish leadership in the Middle East.

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