Criticism
Hugh O'Shaughnessy in The Guardian stated that the Foundation "inspires ridicule". He noted that Professor Michel Schooyans of the Catholic University of Leuven and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences has "accused Blair and his wife of supporting a messianic US plan for world domination." The criticism's focus is that the Foundation's approach amounts to reducing the religions to the same, predetermined common denominator. This means "stripping them of their identity". Schooyans arguing that "(t)his project threatens to set us back to an age in which political power was ascribed the mission of promoting a religious confession, or of changing it. In the case of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, this is also a matter of promoting one and only one religious confession, which a universal, global political power would impose on the entire world."
The director of the Muslim charity Forward Thinking, Huda Jawad has been reported by the BBC as raising doubts about levels of support from many Muslims for the Foundation, given Blair's foreign-policy record.
On 2 April 2009, skeptic and secularist Richard Dawkins mocked the Foundation in a spoof letter, published in the New Statesman. In it, Dawkins ridiculed the idea that faith is not a divisive force, and attacked religion's record on promoting dialogue and equality.
Between April 2008 and April 2009, the foundation raised more than 3.5 million pounds, and paid, according to the Daily Telegraph, six-figure salaries to its top officials. An implied criticism was that these pay scales were in line with much larger charitable organisations. However, the wages were also reported to be the result of external recommendations and a strategy of hiring a small number of capable senior staff to co-ordinate a variety of efforts.
Read more about this topic: Tony Blair Faith Foundation
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