Tony Blair To Lead Anti-Hate Group
Image by Getty Images
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.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
