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In a letter dated 11 June 2009, Nicholas Adams, Director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, has sought to suppress and conceal the factual record on this website relating to the political activities of the CIP, including the political and financial collaboration between David Ford and the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme with former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
The Blair War Crimes Foundation aims to bring Blair to trial for war crimes against civilians relating to the British and American invasion of Iraq. Ford's organisation, the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, while using the name and ancient reputation of the University of Cambridge, and claiming to support dialogue and understanding with Muslims and members of other faiths, in fact has a longstanding and established track record of political collaboration with an indicted war criminal responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and considerable damage to global inter-faith relations - with the Muslim world in particular.
Please join academics, religious leaders of many faiths and ordinary women and men, and sign the online petition to bring Tony Blair to justice before the International Criminal Court. Please also express your concern to the University of Cambridge, that the integrity of its scholarly community of ordinary students and staff, and its academic standing is being brought into disrepute by such political activities by the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme.
"The solution proposed [to the dispute around faith leadership of an SR group in London] is in terms of a governance model using principles of equality, symmetry, neutrality, etc. This holds out the hope of an immediate 'fix' in legal/constitutional terms rather like the way secular modernity responded to religious conflicts...but Scriptural Reasoning in my experience has so far not been convinced by it. The "asymmetries of hospitality" (e.g. the role of Anglicans in initiating St Ethelburga's) are part of the messiness (and providence!) of actual history, which always requires making the most of particular resources and rarely conforms to our abstract principles."
Publicly Circulated Correspondence from David Ford, Director of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, 24 January 2007
"We’re working on putting together this reference group for the development of SR which David Ford will probably chair and which amongst other things will take on the supervision and development of the website,"
Correspondence from Cambridge Inter-faith Programme, 30 April 2007
"The precise conditions and circumstances in which original language texts may or may not be used are exactly the kind of issues on which the [Scriptural Reasoning] Reference Group should guide us. The group will contain eminent people with considerable experience and stature from the three traditions, and it plans, I think, to link with other such groups in the USA."
Additional correspondence, 25 May 2007
The accuracy of all the above written statements may be VERIFIED by contacting the authors directly at:
The Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, Faculty of Divinity, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS, United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 1223 763013 Fax: +44 1223 763014 E-mail: cip@divinity.cam.ac.uk sr@divinity.cam.ac.uk
[The correspondence above was most unwillingly brought into the public domain responding to pressure to provide further information elsewhere, from a Consultant employed by the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme and a member of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning]
The Labour peer Lord Ahmed of Rotherham accused Mr Blair of using Cambridge University as a "front" to organise the event and exclude political opponents.
He told Radio 4 "The conference is fronted by Cambridge University, but organised by Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and the communities department, who have deliberately chosen to exclude those Muslims who disagree with government policy."
The peer, who has not been invited to the conference, said Mr Blair was engaging in "divide and rule" tactics.
"It's a colonial style of governing," he added. "Frankly, it's appalling that Cambridge University is being used for political purposes to see off a last speech."
Matthew Tempest "Blair launches fund to improve teaching of Islam" The Guardian, 4 June 2007
"The Tony Blair Faith Foundation will support The Coexist Foundation with academic guidance from the University of Cambridge in setting up a world-class centre for education about Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Abraham House will be a spectacular new space in central London..."
"Abraham House" Tony Blair Faith Foundation Website [20 April 2009]
"It is also good sometimes to have a physical structure to act as a focus for the work of deeper understanding. So we are collaborating with this university and the Coexist Foundation to establish Abraham House in the heart of London, a place of encounter primarily for the three Abrahamic faiths and a place where Cambridge's pioneering Inter-Faith academic Programme can be taken out and tested at the grass roots."
"Tony Blair Faith Foundation Director of Policy William Chapman speaks at Cambridge University 26 October 2008" Tony Blair Faith foundation Website [20 April 2009]
The Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for the former British prime minister’s prosecution...
These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a “prayer breakfast” with President Obama, the yes-we-can man now launching more war.
“We pray,” said Blair, “that in acting we do God’s work and follow God’s will.”
To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair’s “faith” represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation of the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part – or who, like Alastair Campbell, offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some – might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: “Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, four million refugees, countless maimings and traumas.”
John Pilger "Fake Faith and Epic Crimes" The New Statesman, 2 April 2009
The Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter has called for Tony Blair to be tried for war crimes, in his acceptance speech to the Nobel committee...
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," he said.
"The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public ... a formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
"We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people, and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'."...
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought," he said.
"Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the international criminal court of justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the international criminal court of justice ...
"But Tony Blair has ratified the court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the court have his address if they're interested: it is Number 10, Downing Street, London."...
David Fickling "Pinter Demands War Crimes Trial for Blair" The Guardian, 7 December 2005