As I reflect on yesterday’s terrorist atrocity in London, which once again brutally awakens us to a reality many would like to wish away, my thoughts are as scattered as images on the television screen.
And yet there is one compelling question that presses upon me as information mounts on the casualties from the multiple bombings, and I read the Internet posting by some group calling itself “The Secret Organization of al-Qaida in Europe” triumphantly claiming credit for the carnage:
How long will democracies in the West, apart from the United States, persist in the denial of the war that Osama bin Laden and his worldwide al-Qaida network of Muslim fanatics have declared against them and their allies in the Arab-Muslim world?
This is a global war of an entirely new sort, with no past precedent to draw upon as a lesson. It is not a war between or among sovereign states, pursued by conventional means in pursuit of clearly defined national interests.
This war is asymmetrical, placing civilian populations everywhere at peril against an enemy that cannot be discerned in advance, and whose weapon of choice is portable instruments of human carnage, usually delivered by suicidal agents who have been programmed by an ideology twisting a transcendent faith culture—Islam—into a celebratory cult of death.
It is a war declared by a people who hold no loyalty to any state or principles of international law apart from their own ideology, against people who are bound together by the organizational principles of the modern state.
The closest analogy in this asymmetrical war would be to raids by bandits against organized society with the purpose of eventually gaining recognition for banditry.
Bandits win, if they win at all, when lawfully organized society is drained of its will to eliminate banditry from its midst.
The bandits of al-Qaida—Muslim fanatics on the march in the Middle East and elsewhere, or dormant in sleeper cells only to strike without notice as in Madrid last March—have announced to the world, as in the periodic messages of their leadership, their strategic purpose. It is to drive out what they describe as the Zionists and their crusading Christian European and North American allies from what they claim to be the Arab-Muslim heartland between Egypt’s Nile river and Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates.
Western democracies must take these bandits with the seriousness required, given the mounting casualties—in London and who knows where next.
If not, there will be an inevitable erosion of trust and faith among citizens in the democratic political culture that distinguishes the West from other cultures, particularly those of the Middle East which has spawned these bandits with regrettabe results.
In the 19th century, the great European powers of the time came together to end piracy on the high seas, and make the sea-lanes of the world safe for commerce.
Similarly, Britain took the leadership in ending traffic in slavery, and the United States had to survive a civil war to abolish it from its lands. Thus were the terrible scourges of piracy and slavery in human history brought to an end.
Now, once again, the great powers of the world must set a common purpose to end this latest form of global banditry—dismissing with deserving contempt all the excuses offered by the so-called well-meaning “liberal” folks in the West.
The leaders of today’s great powers are assembled today for their annual summit in Scotland, even as London tends to its wounds from the latest effects of al-Qaida banditry.
Their responsibility to their citizens and the world at large is clear.
If G8 leaders fail in uniting with resolve to the task at hand, all else they talk about will be drivel against the fading echoes from the bombs that shattered peace and brought death on a normal workday morning in London.
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.
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