The fodder for revolutions and terror comes from the teeming ranks of the poor peasantry and urban workers. They bear the burden and contempt of cruel societies and their rulers.
The alchemists of revolutions and terrorism come from the ranks of the relatively privileged class. They are mostly intellectuals who fashion the language of grievance and the apologetics for murder.
Karl Marx (1818-83) found refuge in England of the 19th century. In the safety London provided, he spent his entire life writing and shaping the intellectual tools for his communist revolution.
A century after Marx, Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), confined to a prison cell by the dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser devoted his life similarly to the making of the Islamic revolution against the modern world.
There is much overlapping commonality between communism and Islamism. Both ideologies claim irrefutable sanctity and though their ends are different, there is the common thread of totalitarian appeal at work in both.
The plot to bomb nightclubs in London and drive explosive materials into Glasgow’s airport in a suicide bid by Muslim doctors working in Britain came as a surprise to most people.
HEALERS AND KILLERS
How do those who are professionally devoted to healing the sick—as are the arrested Muslim doctors—plot and execute acts of mass murder? This is the simple question that now bewilders common people across the West, and the implications of the failed “doctors’ plot” will be unavoidably far-reaching even as politicians scramble in Britain and elsewhere to reassure the public.
Fact is, Islamists are Muslims, and a significant segment among Muslim intellectuals around the world is Islamists and its sympathizers. In their ranks are doctors, engineers, dentists, pharmacists, lawyers, accountants and just about every other professional.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian second-ranking leader of al-Qaida and deputy to Osama bin Laden, trained in surgery and came from a family of medical professionals. Al-Zawahiri is not an exception since many of the leading members of the Islamist organizations—Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami, Palestinian Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iranian followers of Ayatollah Khomeini—come from the ranks of doctors and engineers.
This pattern is repeated within immigrant Muslim communities, where it is more ominous than that within the Arab-Muslim world. In Muslim-majority countries with the exception of Iran (and now Gaza controlled by Hamas), Islamists don’t hold power irrespective of their influence with the wider Muslim population.
But Islamists in the West have greater influence than their numbers warrant within the immigrant Muslim communities.
Here professional Muslims (doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc.) with Islamists in their ranks dominate the socio-cultural and political life of immigrant Muslims organized around mosque related institutions, and those Muslims opposed to Islamists are excluded, often forcefully, from participating.
ESCAPING SCRUTINY
Then, ironically, given the nature of electoral politics in democracies, these same Islamists or Muslim apologists of Islamism are regularly courted by politicians and the media, and Islamist ideology escapes scrutiny by gaining respectability.
The failed “doctors’ plot” should be viewed not with surprise, but rather, with alarm. It revealed accidentally and in this instance without causing harm, the extent to which Islamist cells proliferate in our midst—as once communist cells did—with their ideologically driven commitment to wage war against the West denounced as ungodly evil.
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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