There is gathering uneasiness across our world, a sense of things gone wrong and that we dare not give voice to our concerns or, more likely, fears.
A very young, brave and beautiful trooper, Karine Blais, dies in distant Afghanistan and Canadians search for the reason why such a price should be paid for a mission that is increasingly clouded by uncertainty.
Another young woman, a Pakistani in the district of Swat not far from the Afghan border, is publicly flogged by Taliban militia for allegedly being seen in the company of a man who is not her relative.
Her flogging is captured on camera and viewed around the world as further evidence of how utterly depraved is the society where women are routinely given such treatment.
If this is not enough, we get more of the same when some Afghan women take courage to publicly demand repeal of recently passed laws that make marital rape permissible, and are confronted by Afghan men in the streets of Kabul pelting stones at them.
There is piracy in the high seas along the Somalia coast and warnings from regional experts that Pakistan is a failed state with nuclear weapons, sliding perilously close to internal conflict along ethnic divisions and fragmentation.
In the Middle East the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can no longer mask the fault line of the much bigger regional confrontation in the making. This is the rivalry—with real fear of nuclear proliferation—escalating in the Persian Gulf area as the Shiite alliance of Iran and Syria with their surrogates—the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas—seeks dominance over the Sunni partnership of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
In Africa the death toll keeps rising in places such as Congo and Darfur, and the misery index of places such as Zimbabwe and now increasingly South Africa, tell us about a continent incapable on its own to make things any better for a despairing population.
And then there is the West with its present crop of leaders offering apology for wrongs long past, as if such public display of guilt will hold back the anarchy being let loose upon our world.
When we need a Churchill, a Reagan, a Lady Thatcher in our midst, we are surrounded by Neville Chamberlains rushing to appease warmongers such as Iran’s Ahmadinejad. When we need clear thinking and clear prose to dismantle our false sense of safety, we find instead the weakening of our critical faculties essential for discriminating between our friends and our foes.
The poet T.S. Eliot, writing in 1935 under similar circumstances when the world lurched towards unimaginable hell observed, “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.” Eliot’s haunting words, from the time when barbarians of the period organized unchecked and gathered speed, ring increasingly true once again in present times.
SEE THE REALITY
If the death of trooper Karine Blais, and of others who were the best and bravest among Canadians in Afghanistan, are not to be merely statistics in a misbegotten mission we must then awaken to the reality around us.
The West is confronted by an enemy clearly recognizable at war against its values of individual freedom and reason. The enemy is the Islamists. And either the West resolves to defeat the Islamists, or must bear the havoc they spread.
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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