Hurricane Katrina was not quite the Asian tsunami from last December, yet the wreckage left behind where she landed in Louisiana and Mississippi was a reminder of how brittle the human condition is when nature unleashes its fury.
We forget—perhaps forgetfulness saves us our sanity—how fragile is our civility, which can readily snap when a mighty storm blows.
It snapped, just as the winds and water breached the levees protecting New Orleans, revealing for a brief passing moment the lurking beasts of looters and rapists beneath our tamed skins.
I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Lear, the king unhinged by grief and exposed to the storm around him, who rages, “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”
Katrina exposed the human fragility of those in her path. But it also exposed the shamelessly crass politics of those who, from a safe distance, insisted on faulting someone, anyone, for nature’s rage.
Katrina had barely made landfall when Robert Kennedy Jr., (a Democrat) launched the blame game by accusing Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (a Republican) of responsibility, since he opposed the Kyoto Protocol and thereby contributed to global warming that caused the hurricane.
In recent American politics, the lib-left’s venom exceeds Katrina’s fury. It was unleashed against President George Bush for deliberately failing to provide New Orleans’ citizens, mostly black and poor, with federal resources to move to shelter ahead of the hurricane.
Al Sharpton, the race-baiting Democrat from New York City, rose to his reputation as he slammed Bush on MSNBC: “I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA would have found its way in a lot sooner.”
Race and resentment lurk beneath the skin of American society for political charlatans to exploit in disregard of facts and circumstances. Katrina’s wreckage was plainly evident, but the hyperbole of race-baiters exploiting the agony of victims exceeded even the boundaries of broken civility.
Randall Robinson, former president of Transafrica, reported in The Huffington Post online that “black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.” He apparently did not reflect on his words and ask why only “black victims” would turn to cannibalism.
Resentment’s toxin has so corrupted people who think like Robinson that they readily spit upon the weakest victims just to score points against Bush. When his statement could not be verified, he posted a retraction but no apology.
Since the 2000 cliffhanger presidential election, lib-left partisans in American politics have steadily gone berserk in their hatred for Bush.
There is no fury in politics like the spitefulness of sore losers. Republicans have won seven of the last 10 presidential elections, control both Houses of the U.S. Congress, and will soon have a commanding majority in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The mainstream left-leaning media have also contributed to the Democrats’ disorder—Dan Rather of CBS News, for instance, using documents about Bush’s war record that turned out to have been forged (he apologized)—making the party one that serious Americans are reluctant to take seriously.
While Katrina’s fury was elemental, the Democrats seem increasingly unhinged by the politics of race and resentment. America’s Gulf coast will certainly recover from Katrina. The same cannot be said of the once-formidable party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy recovering soon from the lunacy of those who have made it a frat house of juvenile mudslingers.
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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