"[Al Qaeda] are well-financed. Look at their websites." – Tony Blair. Similarly, SBBS is actually a sinister multimillion dollar organisation dedicated to overthrowing civilisation as we know it.

Overall, though, his speech isn’t too bad – he doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t say anything slanderous against Muslims in general. He does, however, miss one of the most important points in the whole struggle.

As Blair says, Al Qaeda (even to the extent that it exists as an organisation rather than an ideology, which is rather limited) cannot be negotiated with. Even individual Al Qaeda-ites will generally not be negotiable-with. So we shouldn’t try and appease them.

However, this ignores the fact that people *become* Al Qaeda-ites not out of random insanity or a love of Blowing Shit Up, but because they feel the West (or the local, insufficiently-Islamist government in Islamic countries) has done appalling and terrible things to the Muslim people. They believe that a proper Taliban-esque government free of Western interference would be the only way to end this injustice.

They’re wrong, in that a Taliban-esque government would make life much more rubbish for most Muslims than it currently is. However, they’re right that the West and the corrupt and brutal leaders we’ve backed in the Muslim world have indeed done appalling and terrible things to many Muslim people over the last 50 years (and are continuing to do so).

Al Qaeda is not a movement for remedying injustice. However, perceived injustice is what attracts young Muslim men to become Al Qaeda-ites. And if young Muslim men were no longer attracted to become Al Qaeda-ites, the terrorist threat would disappear…