Since Ahmed Ressam, the “millennium bomber,” was arrested in December 1999 at the U.S.-Canada border on his way to attack the Los Angeles airport, terrorism and the probability of “homegrown” terrorists have been a frightening prospect for Canadians. The pre-emptive strike by police in arresting a group of Toronto-area young men—Canadian Muslims without exception—on “alleged” terrorism-related charges, with material evidence disclosing intent to harm their country and fellow citizens, indicates Canada is not exempt from terrorist attacks experienced in some major cities across four continents.
We will never know for certain, however, as some will likely argue and certainly the legal defence team of those arrested will insist, if these men would have acted in the manner alleged. This is the paradox in the logic of pre-emption; of containing threat before the threat materializes. Intent is not proof for an act not committed—otherwise thought could be prosecuted as a criminal act.
Pre-emption’s challenge is proving commission of an act, or its intent, compellingly enough to indict those accused of planning such an act, when what is alleged remains a non-event. But when intelligence uncovers a pattern of activities that reveals motives of individuals or groups indicating intent to commit terrorist acts, failing to pre-empt would be dereliction of duty.
Terrorism in our post-9/11 world has become predominantly, though not entirely, linked with Muslims. The inescapable fact is that while all Muslims are not terrorists (a ridiculous proposition in any case), most terrorists suspected or apprehended are Muslims.
Muslim is not an ethnic concept, any more than Christian is an ethnic concept. The Muslim world is not monolithic or homogeneous; it is diverse ethnically and culturally. Islam unifies this world of more than a billion people, geographically stretched out from Morocco on the Atlantic coast to the island archipelago of Indonesia in the Pacific Ocean, and from the inner deserts of Asia to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and the inner reaches of Africa, where the river Nile originates. Muslims share a faith tradition founded on a simple message Islam reiterates: God is one, incomparable, unique, and everything found in the universe is His creation, bears His mark, and will return to Him; man is part of this creation, but also endowed with free will, a gift and a responsibility, that makes him accountable for his conduct.
Islam’s message is revealed in the Koran. And this message unembellished is as stark and unadorned as the desert surroundings where it was revealed to Mohammed, and subsequently spread forth to adjacent lands and peoples. Koran is the oyster containing this message as a pearl. In time, the people who took this message as the defining element of their lives constructed around it a complex civilization reflecting the immense variety of local and regional cultures of the Muslim world. This Islamic civilization once, during the early centuries of the second millennium, was vibrant, creative and in some measure wealthier and militarily stronger than Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and Europe’s emergence as the cradle of modern civilization based on science and democracy.
But there was a dark toxic element present right at the outset of Islam’s history. Muslims of the first generation took the Koran and converted it from an oyster containing a pearl into an instrument for power and its glorification. The civilization that since was fashioned as Islamic eventually divested itself of the Koran’s pearl by glorifying power. In time, the civilization crumbled, as have others in history. The question whether Islam as civilization, not as personal faith, can be repaired, has gripped the minds of many Muslims over the past century and more. This effort does and will continue, for the future cannot be entirely severed from the past. And for Muslims, their past is a haunting reminder of their much diminished present.
The contrast between the present and the past troubles most Muslims. What to do about it remains for them a bewildering challenge. It also provides for the making of a psychology of resentment, anger and shame among a segment of Muslims who hold others responsible for their civilization’s breakdown. Those most engaged in thinking about such matters have been exposed to the wider non-Muslim world, and by the nature of their work are intellectuals of some kind or other.
The alchemists of revolution, now terrorism, are invariably intellectuals. It is their work, soaked in grievances real or imagined, that seeks to inflame opinion and set the world ablaze. Within the Muslim world, these alchemists have stirred men’s minds—especially those with brittle identity suffused with an exaggerated sense of injury and humiliation—from within mosques and schools. They have provided men in power, mostly in uniform, alibis for deflecting their responsibilities to others in the disrepair of their countries and misery of their people. They blame Jews, Christians, Hindus, communists, imperialists and colonialists for their ills, but never themselves. An environment seething with apologetics and resentment is a swamp from where terrorists emerge. They might represent a miniscule minority of Muslims, but even as a tiny fraction of more than a billion people, their numbers are frighteningly large and they are spread all over the world.
In Canada, as throughout the West, Muslims represent the diversity of the larger Muslim world and reflect within their communities all its problems. They need to be watched, and the fraction in their communities who might act on the words of Muslim alchemists pre-empted—for inevitably Muslims will disown them after the deed is done, as a criminal minority. In Canada or elsewhere, Muslims in general have not done what is needed, taking responsibility for their own history, so its repair might begin without faulting others. In the post-9/11 world, pre-emption must not be faulted out of an excessive liberalism, nor Muslims held lightly for their words and deeds—out of which, the alchemists in their midst concoct a toxic mix for minds readily deranged to act out horrible deeds.
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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