Tony Blair has challenged South African Muslims protesting against his visit to SA to rather protest against the Muslims he says are doing most of the killing in Iraq and elsewhere.

Instead of SA Muslims trying to effect a citizen’s arrest on him, he says: “I ask them, ‘Why don’t you protest against those doing the killing?’” Most deaths because of terrorist activity were in Muslim-on-Muslim violence, according to him – “an outrage against the proper faith of Islam”.

The Office of Tony Blair had earlier released the statement below in response to Desmond Tutu’s withdrawal from the Discovery Invest leadership conference taking place in Jozi.

Tutu felt that Blair hadn’t been moral in his decision to agree to go to war with the United States, of America.

But Blair felt he had made a good moral decision, and retorted that, “I don’t think you could say that leaving Saddam Hussein in place was a morally superior choice.”

Here’s his statement, in the third person:

Obviously Tony Blair is sorry that the Archbishop has decided to pull out now from an event that has been fixed for months and where he and the Archbishop were never actually sharing a platform.

As far as Iraq is concerned they have always disagreed about removing Saddam by force – such disagreement is part of a healthy democracy.

As for the morality of that decision we have recently had both the memorial of the Halabja massacre where thousands of people were murdered in one day by Saddam’s use of chemical weapons; and that of the Iran-Iraq war where casualties numbered up to a million including many killed by chemical weapons.

So these decisions are never easy morally or politically.

Meanwhile, Discovery said that they wouldn’t be asking for the donation that they made to the Desmond Tutu Foundation back. Discovery spokesperson Hylton Kallner didn’t want to say much about how Tutu was remunerated for the event he’s no longer attending:

We can’t disclose the exact details of the contract. We did make a donation to Tutu’s trust, but it was made in good faith.

Security has been beefed up for Blair’s presence at the conference today.

[Source: IOL]