America has given much to the world, and keeps on giving.
America has given the world Louis Armstrong and Muhammad Ali, Bill Gates, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Whitman, Humphrey Bogart, Neil Armstrong, Linus Pauling, Elvis Presley, Norman Borlaug, David Petraeus, Ella Fitzgerald and the beat goes on.
Now America gives the world another measure of her unrivalled greatness by electing an Afro-American – Barack Hussein Obama – as the 44th president.
This drama of a man born of a Kenyan father and a white American woman could only have been imagined and enacted in a republic which too was an act of democratic imagination unprecedented in history.
The greatness of a country, as that of an individual, is reflected in the goodness and generosity at its core. This was evident in the graciousness with which Sen. John McCain, after a hard-fought contest, conceded defeat and congratulated president-elect Obama.
But the 2008 election was not about America expiating for her past sins of slavery, though it has been made to appear so by some observers within and outside the United States.
America’s history has been one of continuous social reforms despite difficulties, and of opening doors for people to reach for goals to which they aspire. This cannot be similarly said of other places – not even of Europe – and especially not from where Obama’s father came and then returned.
In Africa and across the Arab-Muslim world Obama’s story could not be imagined, and if it was it would be forbidden for there the sins of slavery, racial bigotry and ethnic violence remain entrenched.
The election was about alternative policies, and of the two men who was more appealing and better qualified to be America’s next president. Until the dreadful news of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression broke upon the American public in the last week of September, McCain’s polling numbers were even with those of Obama.
By any objective measure McCain was a more worthy candidate for the White House than Obama. But McCain was hobbled by the unpopularity of the incumbent president, slandered by partisan mainstream media unapologetically committed to electing Obama and an electorate understandably swept by fear when the sub-prime mortgage crisis triggered a trillion dollar bailout for the financial sector with an economic recession in its wake.
In America the government is, as Lincoln famously phrased it, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The people can be magnanimous or unforgiving, wise or fearful, demanding or punishing.
Too many questions and doubts about Obama’s associations and politics loomed over his candidacy while his friends in the media worked zealously to cloud or erase them. Similar questions and doubts would have buried the candidacy of any other non-black person.
At the end the much anticipated election, with voter turnout expected to be at an historic high, did not grow over the previous election. The 2004 popular vote count had stood at over 121 million, and the 2008 popular vote count was about the same.
McCain lost by some seven million votes or five percentage points, and Obama’s win was not a landslide. After Americans had voted their republic remained just about evenly divided in a world no less menacing than before.
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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