PARIS—July 1 marked the 90th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme. On that summer morning in 1916, Britain’s greatest military offensive against the German army began in what has come to be known as the Great War.
Between dawn and dusk on that day—chiseled in the memory of a now rapidly dwindling number of old men and women who lost their dear ones—more than 40,000 of Britain’s best and noblest (including a significant number from then-colony Newfoundland) lay wounded and 20,000 dead.
But on this most recent July 1, nine decades later, Europe seemed tranquil on the surface, and the only sound of battles being fought, won and lost emanated from football stadiums in Germany, which is hosting the World Cup.
Visiting Paris, I wrote last week that France was stoically preparing for another Waterloo at the feet of Brazil’s sorcerers.
I could not have been more wrong. Zinedine Zidane’s inspired leadership produced a result for France that no bookmaker on this side of the Atlantic imagined, and it must have swelled Napoleon’s bosom wherever his ghost rides.
The day before the Brazil-France match, I visited Versailles with my wife to tour the palace built by the Sun King, Louis XIV. It was my first chance to visit to the buildings that speak to the glory of France, and to walk the Hall of Mirrors where the 1919 Treaty of Versailles was signed.
Football can be dreary, and this is what its North American critics seize upon to deride the sport. But for its devoted fans it is poetry, which the uninitiated find difficult to decipher.
During a private party, a French physician, almost aristocratic in demeanour, informed me with the sort of fake politeness that only European intellectuals can muster, that football is a popular sport that no one with taste indulges in. His disdain for football disclosed to me in a flash the immense chasm which separates France’s (and Europe’s) intellectual elite from its working population.
I watched last weekend’s game with friends in an apartment on the outskirts of Paris—where last fall immigrant youths from North Africa torched cars and hurled flaming bottles at French police. By the time the game began, stillness had descended like a curtain in the neighbourhood and across most of France.
Then, 57 minutes into the game, Zidane, surveying the field like the Corsican upstart, Napoleon, in the Battle of Austerlitz, produced magic with his foot and Thierry Henry, France’s attacking forward, pounced upon the ball to net the decisive goal against Brazil.
A roar erupted that shattered the quiet across France, and I was pulled up into the cheering embrace of men and delirious kisses of women gathered for what became a long evening of celebration—a celebration that was repeated again last night with yesterday’s victory over Portugal.
With these improbable wins, we now hear the joyous roar of a France that had felt disdained and hurting—of those who came from former colonies to make their homes here.
With Sunday’s World Cup championship now conceivably within their grasp, two of France’s immigrant underclass—Zidane and Thierry—have given their country a moment of glory that Louis XIV and Napoleon themselves would surely appreciate.
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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