Blair to be Declared ’Persona Non Grata’

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Tony Blair is losing his prestigious role as the Middle East’s Quartet envoy after Palestinians said they are considering declaring him ’persona non grata’.

By Press TV

September 30, 2011 "Press TV" - - Senior authorities in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) said they would cut all contacts with the former British Prime Minister, who was given the role as the representative of the Quartet - including the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States - after he was forced to resign his post as the UK premier in 2007.

Then US president George W. Bush wanted to appreciate Blair’s sincere allegiance to his atrocities, therefore nominated him for the post to coordinate Western attempts to buy legitimacy for the illegal Israeli entity and to stabilize its occupation of the Palestinian territories.

However, PLO authorities, although late but better than never, recognized the fact that Tony Blair’s activities are favoring the Israeli regime at the international arena and he is actually acting as an ’extreme’ Israeli diplomat, rather than an impartial mediator.

The PLO decided that Blair is no longer trusted to be an international representative as he is strongly lobbying European powers to decline a Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN Security Council, and that they would declare him ’persona non grata’ in the next few days.

The statehood bid was submitted to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week by chief of Palestinian Fatah party, Mahmoud Abbas during the General Assembly’s annual meeting in New York.

“He does not represent the international community but works according to his own opinion, which he shares with the more extreme Israelis. We see him as an Israeli diplomat”, said one senior Palestinian official.

“There is no one within the Palestinian leadership that supports or likes or trusts Tony Blair, particularly because of the very damaging role he played during our UN bid”, another PLO authority said.

“He is considered persona non grata in Palestine. Although we can’t prevent him from coming here, we can hopefully minimise the role he can play because he is not a mediator, he is totally biased on one side”, he added.

Many also accuse Blair of placing his business interests above his diplomatic responsibilities. A conflict of interest was posed by his £2million-a-year job as consultant for investment bank JP Morgan and his executive role at Tony Blair Associates.

“There is no question in my mind that Tony Blair is incredibly sympathetic to the Israeli cause and throughout his time as an envoy there has been a question mark about whether he fully understands the position of the Arab countries. He is not the honest broker that he pretends to be”, said Labour MP Paul Flynn.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair’s unusually close relationship with an Israeli divorcee in the occupied Palestinian territories led to speculations by some local press that he had developed an ’intimate affair’ with the billionaire woman.

He, of course, reacted angrily to the reports and used an interview broadcast on India’s CNBC-TV18 to answer those rumors and other allegations of using his position to win lucrative business contracts in the wealthy Middle East region.

Referring to the August unrests in his country, Blair admitted that the developments have tarnished the UK’s international standing.

But, instead of addressing the root causes of the unprecedented unrest and civil disobedience, the former prime minister moved on to blame the children of alcoholics, drug addicts and prostitutes for the violence.

Blair said those young people who came to the streets of British cities to demand jobs, their social rights and an end to the government’s military interventionist policies, came from ’dysfunctional families’.

"The parents are often on drugs or have got alcohol problems, the mother may be in prostitution and so on, it’s a small number of families but they cause an immense amount of damage in local communities," he claimed.

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Would You Buy a Used Car from Tony?

Tony Blair: Time To Go?

As point-man for the international Quartet, the former UK PM should not be defending Israel at Palestine’s expense.

By Marwan Bishara

September 30. 2011 "Al Jazeera" - - Tony Blair has been a political salesman since he first made his debut at the British Labour Party conference. And he is good, no doubt about that.

Not only because he speaks coherently; he is Scottish after all. Nor is it because he’s often compared with George W Bush.

It’s because Tony could peddle ideas and sell economic and military agendas better than most.

The question is: Would you buy a used car from Tony?

The Palestinians and the Arabs in general have concluded enough is enough.

Nabil Sha’ath, the Palestinian Authority’s first ever foreign minister, told me last year: "Forget Tony Blair. I think Mr Blair is at the wrong time at the wrong place and he’s just making it easier for Mr Netanyahu to deceive us, really, in more ways than one."

Despite their suspicion that Blair betrayed them on more than a few occasions - siding with Israel behind their backs - he remained set in his position shuttling between Jerusalem, London and Washington.

And last week, Blair was dispatched to sell US and Israeli arguments for rejecting the Palestinian request for membership to reluctant UN Security Council members. He went beyond the call of duty.

There is always something for Tony in what Tony does, and nowadays he’s trying to renew his tenure as the international Quartet’s point man on Palestine. The Quartet, composed of the US, EU, UN and Russia, is supposedly responsible for making peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

If I remember correctly, Blair negotiated his salary with Condi Rice at the State Department in 2007 when he was first appointed to the post. And he has one particular asset there.

For all practical purpose, Tony has been the public face of Dennis Ross, Israel’s man at the White House. Ross has been a behind-the-scenes architect of the Obama administration’s policy shift over the past year, leading to Washington’s veto of the UN Security Council draft resolution on the illegality of Israeli settlements, and Obama’s Zionist speech, at the UN last week.

History of salesmanship

Blair started his career with the Labour Party in the mid 1980s as a junior parliamentarian and became its spokesman for six years. Three years later, he was the party’s candidate for prime minister under the slogan: "Things can only get better."

And things did get better - for him, but not necessarily for the country.

He won the elections in a landslide and changed the rebranded the party "New Labour".

During his tenure, public relations superseded reform in government, promoting "Cool Britannia" against the backdrop of mounting nepotism and financial discrepancies.

Blair’s so called Third Way (with selected ideas from British sociologist Anthony Giddens) left the British economy in shambles and its society in a terrible malaise.

The liberalisation of the banking sector and financial services left London far more exposed than its European partners when the financial crisis hit.

Things got much worse during his second term when Blair turned to foreign affairs. He sold George W’s "global war on terror" after 9/11, earning him the title of "Bush’s poodle".

The low point of British politics came against the backdrop of Blair’s enthusiastic support for Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Despite the terrible fiasco of the occupation and the revelation that the war’s justifications were false, Tony continued to sell the expired and rotten policy without shame.

From selling war to peddling peace

Many demanded that he be put on trial for war crimes. But in the age of empire, he was appointed as the point man for the Middle East peace process.

He went on to defend Israel’s policy in the West Bank. He promoted its "humane occupation" each time Israel removed one of its several hundred roadblocks and checkpoints that choke life and living in Palestine.

Tony Blair was nowhere to be seen during the first nine days of Israeli’s 2008 war on Gaza. He was on holiday.

Even today’s British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was irritated: "People in the Middle East are entitled to ask themselves, ’Where is Tony Blair?’"

When 500 people were getting killed in the impoverished Gaza strip, Blair - according to his aide - was working tirelessly (at the private opening of an Armani store in London) to mediate a ceasefire.

Arguably, Blair’s part time job as Quartet special envoy says as much about his capacity to rebound as it does about Washington’s disrespect for the Arabs; about a humiliated and divided Middle East, or about the nature of the "peace process" itself.

It also says much about the so-called international Quartet, that the Bush administration appointed the body to prelaunch its sponsored negotiations in 2002, which were, of course, an utter failure.

Why would the Secretary General of the United Nations that represents the whole community of nations accept being a junior partner in a geopolitical configuration? It is beyond me. Or, for that matter, why should Europe or Russia have their own seats at the negotiating table? Who said these hypocritical, cynical entities could deliver peace in the Middle East?

Be that as it may, the Arabs can’t fire President Obama or Russian Prime Minister Putin. They cannot ask Ban Ki-moon to step aside. They could, however, end the Quartet’s mission.

They could at least tell the Quartet to fire its special envoy before he becomes persona non grata. He is already unwelcome in Palestine.

In retrospect, Palestinians reckon it’s unfair to call Tony a poodle. Poodles are harmless.

Marwan Bishara is Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst. He was previously a professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris. An author who writes extensively on global politics, he is widely regarded as a leading authority on the Middle East and international affairs.