Tony Blair To Lead Anti-Hate Group
Former British prime minister Tony Blair has been appointed chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR), a Brussels-based organization dedicated to tackling racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism in Europe.
Last week it was announced that Blair would be standing down from his role as Middle East envoy next month, after eight years struggling to advance peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians.
He will take over from former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski in the honorary role at the ECTR, which has campaigned for new laws to give courts greater power to prosecute hate speech and make Holocaust denial illegal.
“Despite our best efforts to build a consensus around tolerance in Europe, we still see injustice, discrimination and hideous acts of violence on the continent,” Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007, said in a statement.
“Incidents of extremism, rising anti-Semitism and surging nationalist forces who seek to cultivate a spirit of resentment by playing on people’s fears threaten our European ideals of freedom, equality and a desire for peace.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO