BLAIR LINKS KASHMIR CRISIS TO ISLAMIC EXTREMISM

Blair links Kashmir crisis to Islamic extremismAdd to Clippings
RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL
[ 3 Aug, 2006 0058hrs ISTTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
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LONDON: A furious political row has erupted over British PM Tony Blair's decision to link the Kashmir dispute and Chechen fighting with the conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and West Asia — which he described as part of an over-arching "arc of (Muslim) extremism" across the world.

Just hours after he called for the West to totally rethink its strategy on the war on terror, Blair's critics said it was wrong to link regional territorial disputes such as Kashmir to global Islamist extremism.

In his speech at the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the British PM said: "The fanatics, attached to a completely wrong and reactionary view of Islam, had been engaging in terrorism for years before September 11.

In Chechnya, in India and Pakistan, in Algeria, in many other Muslim countries, atrocities were occurring." He declared that "these acts of terrorism were not isolated incidents. They were part of a growing movement."

Blair said the "movement believed Muslims had departed from their proper faith, were being taken over by Western culture, were being governed treacherously by Muslims complicit in this takeover, whereas the true way to recover not just the true faith, but Muslim confidence and self esteem, was to take on the West and all its works."

In his speech, Blair said that the West had been mistaken in previously failing to link Kashmir and Chechnya-inspired terrorist attacks to a growing baleful Islamism.

"We were not bending our eye or our will to it as we should have... We rather inclined to the view that where there was terrorism, perhaps it was partly the fault of the governments of the countries concerned," he said.

He said it was time to recognize that "whatever the outward manifestation at any one time — in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iraq in Afghanistan, in Kashmir, in a host of other nations including some in Africa now — it is a global fight about global values; it is about modernisation, within Islam and outside of it".

Britain's former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind said the Kashmir issue was a "matter between India and Pakistan" and it was "silly" for Blair to portray it as a sign of extremist Islam's war on other cultures.