The IISS Manama Dialogue 2014
Your highnesses, lords and ladies, your excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen welcome, and welcome to the 10th IISS Manama Dialogue.
Thank you for making the effort to come. I myself and Dr Chipman are extremely proud of what we have been able to achieve in partnership over the past 10 years.
I know that this forum is one of the most important in the world and your time is very valuable so you taking some of it to come and visit us here in the Kingdom and to visit with each other is very much appreciated, and I think valued.
Ladies and gentlemen, I do not have a keynote address, but I do have a thought I would like to leave with you over this time. And maybe it is something you can keep in the back of your mind, you can discuss and debate.
And if we look at the strategic situation that we find ourselves in, our War On Terror is a little bit older than ten years, but not by much. And I think the time has come for us to get rid of that name. It is a bit misleading, it is not the entirety and the totality of our conflict, or of our strategic direction or threat, terrorism is merely the tool that is used by people.
If I think back in the last century, we faced a very different foe. We faced communism and we faced it together. But when we faced communism we understood it as an ideology. Terrorism is not an ideology.
Ladies and gentlemen: we are not only fighting terrorists, we are fighting theocrats. And I use the term theocrats as this war that we are engaged in cannot be against Islam, it cannot be against Christianity, it cannot be against Judaism, it cannot be against Buddhism. It is unfair to those of us who practice our religion responsibly, and in the manner that I believe it was brought to us to practice, and it sullies the name of a great tradition and a great philosophy that is divine and must be above.
So Ladies and Gentlemen, if we are to call ourselves in a war with theocrats then I believe that we can start to put together the military, social, and political, and maybe even economic policies, in a holistic manner to counter this, as we did with communism.
But what do we call it?
Do we call it ‘theo-crism?’ To invent a word.
Do we call it ‘fascist theocracy?’
We must find a term that we can all share. I mean the absurdity of having ISIL, ISIS, Da’ish, all representing one group – Al Qaeda and God knows what else in the future – allows us to hop blindly and haphazardly from one threat to the other, without containing it in a complete panic.
I am afraid that the events of 2011 – I prefer to call it the Arab Storm, it was certainly not a Spring – and history will judge whether it was Berlin in 1989 or the Bolsheviks in 1917 where state paradigms collapse and into the vacuum comes an extreme ideology.
Ladies and gentlemen we will be fighting these theocrats for a very long time, barbaric though they are.
The question is: Do we have the courage, and the moral and intellectual integrity to call them out for what they are. These are people who are trying to govern us here on Earth and in the hereafter. These are people who isolate themselves from the rest of the international community. These are people who disregard human life and do not value the social order and the social contract that we have established among ourselves as societies of humans. These are people who oppress women and these are people who slaughter anyone who does not condone or approve of or subscribe to their own twisted ideology.
So while politics may drag people into it, it is the ideology itself that must be combatted. It must be named, it must be shamed, it must be contained, and eventually it must be defeated. And we must use all resources to hold accountable those who place themselves above other ordinary human beings and claim they have divine right to rule.
I think instead of entering into debate about certain political parties, whether they’re Islamist or not – faith can certainly be a part of any party – but we cannot have is a man, an individual, placed at the top of a religious ideology who has the power by religion’s edict to strip someone either of their hereafter – and use that for political gains, sounds very much like the 17th century to me. And, ladies and gentlemen, the 17th century has no place in our modern 21st.
So that is the one thought, that I call on you to discard the term war on terror and focus on the real threat which is the rise of these evil theocracies.
Thank you very much.
