By Jim Holstun

Have we lost our sense of smell?

The UB Distinguished Speakers Series has invited former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to speak on October 7. According to his exclusive booking agency,  he will receive $150,000 plus travel and expenses for four persons. The Peace, Justice, and Antiwar Coalition of Western New York (PJAW) has organized a demo for peace and against Blair and his procurers. Please join us at 7:00 p.m. in the Coventry Loop of Alumni Arena, and bring signs and friends. And please don’t buy tickets to this obscene event. Please don’t even take a comp. ticket.

Why protest Tony Blair? Compared to the shamelessly despicable Karl Rove—a Distinguished Speaker of the 2008-9 season at UB—Blair seems almost innocuous. With his goofy grin and his public parade of his faith (including the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and his Faith and Globalisation Initiative), he can come across as a charmingly eccentric combination of Howdy Doody and an earnest choirboy.

The Blair War Crimes Foundation provides a quick answer when it indicts Blair for “Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maiming and traumas.” Some more detail:

• During his years as Prime Minister (1997-2007), Blair helped maintain the murderous sanctions on the people of Iraq (1990-2003). From 1990 to 1999 alone, these killed 500,000 to 800,000 people, mostly infants and children. Like former US Secretary of State (and UB Distinguished Speaker) Madeline Albright, Blair thinks “the price was worth it.”
  
• Blair’s government provided the “Dodgy Dossier,” a lying and plagiarized compendium that fueled our flight to war. US Secretary of State Colin Powell—also a war criminal and twice a UB “Distinguished Speaker”—used it in the notorious UN presentation that took our country to war.
  
• In 2002, Mr. Blair conspired with former US President George Bush to launch a war of aggression. At the Nuremberg Military Tribunal after World War II, Robert H. Jackson, said “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” In his 2005 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, the late British playwright Harold Pinter called for Blair to be arraigned before the International Court of Justice, adding that “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.”
  
• Estimates of Iraqi casualties during Blair and Bush’s War on Iraq vary from 100,000 to over 1,200,000.
  
• Blair and Bush’s War has created millions of orphans and almost five million refugees, either internally displaced in Iraq, or living in the festering refugee camps of Syria and Jordan.
• As of September 20, 2009, Blair and Bush’s War has killed 4,345 American servicemen and women, and wounded 31,102. Many of those dead lie buried in Western New York. Many of those wounded lie in our hospitals and walk or roll down our streets and the sidewalks of our campus.

• Like President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Prime Minister Blair refused to call for a ceasefire during Israel’s 2006 assault on Lebanon. By war’s end, Israel did billions of dollars of damage to Lebanon’s infrastructure, made half a million people refugees, and killed 1300 civilians.
  
• Tony Blair’s lies fueled our contemporary financial crisis. As of September 21, 2009, Americans have paid more than 684 billion dollars for Blair and Bush’s War. As of the same date, the residents of Erie County alone have paid over paid over two billion ($2,733,000,000).
  
• For more, please see The Blair War Crimes Foundation’s  letter to the President of the UN General Assembly. Its distinguished signatories include Jonathan Cook, Dr Nawal el Saadawi, Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Richard Dawkins, and Ken Loach.
  
• Turning to UB’s responsibilities. The bulging pot of money paid to Blair is particularly rankling at a time when UB President John Simpson is pressing Albany to accept UB2020, which would allow him to contract out union jobs of UB employees, raise student tuition, and corporatize campus property. But worse than this: if UB follows its practice with earlier well-paid visiting war criminals (Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, Karl Rove), questions to Blair will be screened and censored. This is a gross violation of free speech. It’s even worse than shouting a speaker down, since it provides the illusion of genuine debate.

Will we see lots of people protesting, or just a few? Will we allow this grinning, blood-soaked little monster to pass through town and pick up his check, without a discouraging word? Please join us at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 7^th, in the Coventry Loop of Alumni Arena at the UB North Campus. For a map, please see the next page, or click here.

If you wish to protest the UB’s Administration’s stifling of free speech, its selection of Blair as a Distinguished Speaker, or the GSA’s (inaccurate) pronouncement of him as a “Graduate Student Choice” speaker, please consider write one or more of the following:

—Ms. Nicole M. Jowsey, GSA President, 645-2960, gsa-president@buffalo.edu.

—William J. Regan, Director, Office of UB Special Events, 645-6148, wjregan@buffalo.edu

—John B. Simpson, UB President, 645-2901, simpson@buffalo.edu

—Satish Tripathi, UB Provost, 645-2992, provost@buffalo.edu.

For any updates, please see the PJAW website.

—The Peace, Justice, and Antiwar Coalition of WNY (http://pjaw.org)

Protest war criminal tony blair

Wednesday, October 7^th, 7:00 p.m.,

Coventry Loop outside Alumni Arena (#1) for the demonstration. 

Best parking (free at night) in Baird A&B, Slee A&B, Special Event Lot, Stadium Lot, Arena Lot, or LaSalle Lot. Full campus map at http://www.buffalo.edu/buildings/pdf-page.html.