Leadership Quote by Tony Blair

Religious conflict, Blair implies, isn’t a mass craving so much as a media-friendly product: a minority with a talent for turning grievance into spectacle. The line works because it flips the usual framing. Instead of treating sectarian violence as evidence of deep, widespread hatred, it reassigns agency to a smaller set of actors who understand leverage - and to the institutions that amplify them. “Small in number” is both reassurance and rebuke: reassurance that most people aren’t itching for holy war, rebuke that we keep letting a fringe set the emotional temperature.

The subtext is unmistakably post-9/11 and post-Iraq. Blair spent years arguing that Islam and the West were not destined for collision, even as his own decision to join the Iraq War fed the very chaos he’s gesturing toward. So the sentence is partly defensive: if extremists dominate the headline, that doesn’t mean the broader story is extremist. It’s also an attempt to redraw the battlefield from theology to attention. The true contest is narrative control - who gets to define what “religion” is in public life.

“Dominate the headline” is doing the heavy lifting. It nods to the incentives of modern news: conflict is legible, dramatic, and compressible; coexistence is not. Blair’s intent, then, is strategic as much as moral: deprive provocateurs of oxygen by refusing to let them stand in for entire faiths, and you shrink the conflict they’re trying to manufacture.