Oppose Tony Blair as Middle East Envoy

To: Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission

We call on you, as President of the European Commission, to resist pressures from outside Europe to appoint Tony Blair as special envoy to the Middle East on behalf of the "Quartet". We have no confidence that Mr Blair will act impartially and we want to see a person appointed to this role who understands the rights and needs of everyone in the Middle East and who will work for a just and lasting peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Sign it here.

Just worth a try

Sometimes this world just seems too hard to understand. Too endlessly unjust. Too systematically, unceasingly unjust. Too endlessly rewarding of injustice.

Too hard to bear.

What would one want? For the unjust to suffer what they wreak on others? For Blair to have his children's limbs ripped off in front of his eyes? For Bush to watch his wife give birth to a deformed foetus, irradiated from single ghoulish eye to outsized toes with uranium shot from foreign tanks?

Of course not. But to see Blair given the first standing ovation Parliament has ever given a Prime Minister; to see the sycophantic press pack fall over themselves to write his ‘legacy’, his place in history next to Churchill and Lord Nelson; and to see him - this is what grates - in the role of ‘peacemaker’ in the Middle East, after all he has done to make war and wreak havoc there and all he has done to prolong and intensify the suffering of those who were only trying to lead their lives until he came along – that really grates.

And somehow, it grates even more, the thought that he might succeed. That through his bullying, duplicitous ways, backed up by US dollars or the threat of their withdrawal, backed up by the press pack who want only to shine in his glow, and backed up by British-made weapons hanging over the heads of anyone who dares to defy his line of ‘peace’ – he may just push through a compromise.

Why does that grate most of all? It shouldn’t: surely peace at any price is better than no peace. If a pushing, shoving, duplicitous and ambitious warmonger is the best way to ensure it – and I even wonder if it may be – then why complain.

The trouble is that then one wonders what on earth it’s really all about. Why on earth promote these gentle, caring, harm-free values if they only get you stamped on. Or shot up with uranium from a foreign tank.

Just suppose...

... that we were living in one of those 'rogue' states that human rights educators (and moral philosophers) love to latch on to - Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. How would we as 'human rights educators' respond to that? What would be the values or the 'competences' we would think it important to try to develop?

Or just suppose that we were living in Gaza / Iraq / Chechnya / Afghanistan today - or any other place around the globe where life is almost not worth living. (How) would we respond to that as human rights educators? (Or is the question quite as idiotic as it sounds)

And now: just suppose that we are living in Israel / the UK / USA / Russia / or any other country actively or passively supporting terror around the world. How, as human rights educators, should we respond to that?

Or is that an idiotic question as well?

I genuinely don't know the answer. But I can't see how we are not troubled by it; and I am surprised that it almost doesn't seem to be a question that the HRE community discusses. There are media workers against the war, military families against the war, war veterans against the war, and a few teachers against the war. Where are the human rights educators against the war?

Our defence is that we are working for the long term: that we are teaching the values that will ensure we do not go to war again. But I am not so sure... I am not sure that we can afford to (or are entitled to) refuse to work for the short term, when things are as they are; and I am also not sure that the values we concentrate on in HRE are really those which are going to best ensure that future populations stand up to governments that carry out crimes against humanity.

I am reminded of a quote from Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's wonderful book about Eugene de Kock ('Prime Evil') - 'A Human Being Died that Night':

De Kock and many of the apartheid government's operatives have said repeatedly that what kept them going - what sustained their zeal and conviction in the rightness of crushing the heads of thousands of black activists - was the tacit but powerful support they felt they were receiving from the beneficiaries of apartheid privilege - the polite churchgoers, the cultured suburbanites, the voters. It is at their feet that the responsibility for apartheid, ultimately, can be laid'.

No lesser crimes are being committed today: are we so very different in our cultured suburban educating?