As another year ends, there will be the auditing of how 2009 stacked up against other bygone years.
The best that might be said of 2009 for certain is the worst fear of a near-total economic breakdown was either greatly exaggerated, or the world got lucky.
Indeed luck, as the myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans had it, is the blind dispensation of the goddess of fortune.
And it is perhaps better to be lucky in prayers to our respective deities than rely on the sagacity of those politicians and intellectuals who think nothing in playing god.
Again, in the ancient Greek mythology, ‘moira’ or fate of man never went unmet when he acted out of caprice or pride.
‘Nemesis,’ the goddess of retribution, always followed closely the ‘hubris’ or arrogance of an individual taunting the gods of destiny.
We might well look back upon 2009 as the year of the ‘nemesis’ and thankfully take it as a warning not to pay much heed to the arrogant prattle of those we appoint to positions of authority in public life.
At the beginning of 2009, the man Americans elected to be their 44th president took office.
U.S. President Barack Obama prattled that he would heal the planet and lower the oceans and, only days into the new station in his life, his inaugural words were deemed good enough for the Nobel Prize committee in Oslo, Norway, to select him to receive the peace prize.
Obama’s hubris – heedless of history, not unlike Icarus of Greek mythology – took flight, bringing him close to the sun of popular acclaim.
His nemesis at the year’s end – given his paltry legislative record, his reckless spending, his predictably boring rhetoric – was a fall in public opinion steeper and lower than that of any American president since such records have been kept in modern times.
Then nemesis struck Al Gore, the high priest of global environmentalism, and the UN as the church of man-made global warming.
Climategate, or the shenanigans of the member-scientists of an exclusive UN club called Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, revealed fudged computer figures of temperature data generated, in part, the hysterics of man-made global warming.
The hubris – that science by consensus, at the behest of the UN, had settled the unsettled science of climate and provided the calculus for carbon off-setting to enable a non-elected and unaccountable international bureaucracy to raid with impunity the treasury of developed countries on behalf of undeveloped countries – could not have gone unnoticed by the goddess of retribution.
In Copenhagen these past weeks, nemesis showed her wrath.
The priests and followers of global environmentalism, it seems, never paid heed to Galileo who knew all about rigged science by consensus.
Galileo maintained, despite the inquisitorial high priests hounding him, ‘Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.’
Nature, in other words, reigns supreme and the raising or lowering of oceans is independent of what man does or may do irrespective of what hucksters in politics and science tell us.
If this is the lesson of 2009, it will then be a most memorable year.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
- Israel: Decades-old conflict not about to cease - Saturday November 24, 2012 at 1:56 pm
- The better man lost the U.S. election - Saturday November 10, 2012 at 9:16 am
- The puzzle in U.S. presidential elections - Saturday November 3, 2012 at 8:43 am
