In the roll call of cities across four continents bombed by Muslim terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001, London was not going to remain ignored indefinitely by executives of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida fraternity.
London’s immunity was never guaranteed by the city giving refuge to Muslim fundamentalists who’ve gathered there over the past several decades, making Dickens’ city the clearinghouse of their global jihad.
Terrorists either failed to strike ahead of Britain’s general election in May, 2005, or increased security vigilance foiled their effort to duplicate in Britain the result of the March, 2004, Spanish election (al-Qaida operatives influenced its outcome by bombing a Madrid commuter train).
Though the London bombings are not surprising, those who carried out the deed have confirmed a reality liberal democracies have been reluctant to acknowledge.
So long as Muslim terrorists were “outsiders”—as were the suicide bombers who hijacked jetliners and flew them into buildings on 9/11—the fiction could be maintained that the war on terror and its causes were beyond the borders of Europe and North America.
But as Stewart Bell has documented in his invaluable study, Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Around the World, the more insidious aspect of global jihad (war) is the ideological indoctrination, recruitment and effective mobilization by Islamists of Muslims born in the West.
The remarkably swift identification of the bombers as British-born Pakistani Muslims reveals their “nice” faces masking the grim reality of how vulnerable liberal democracies are when their values of openness and multicultural accommodation are exploited by fascists.
The recent preoccupation in the media with the bloody-minded Iraqi insurgency, the Iranian election, the unending cycle of Palestinian-Israeli conflict and George Bush/Tony Blair bashing that lib-left ideologues exult in, has obscured the role of Pakistan and its expatriates in the West in the global jihad of Islamists.
Pakistan has been a rogue state for a very long time, a haven for radical Islamists, and a strategic heartland of militant Islamic fundamentalism armed with nuclear weapons. Here Islamists (with high-level support at one time of the military) created the infrastructure of global jihad during the decade-long war fought in Afghanistan against the former Soviet Union. From there emerged the Taliban and their supporters, indoctrinated in religious schools with an anti-modern, anti-West and misogynistic ideology imported from Saudi Arabia that now permeates large segments of Pakistani society.
Pakistani leadership
Pakistani Islamists—such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and presently in U.S. custody; and Ramzi Yousef, tried and convicted in the U.S. as the mastermind in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—have provided leadership to the global jihad financed by wealthy patrons from the oil-rich Middle East.
But it was the role of British-born Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh—educated in the English school system with a stint in the famed London School of Economics where he studied statistics before dropping out as a jihadist—in the 2002 kidnapping and killing in Karachi of the Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, that indicated how children born of Muslim Pakistani immigrants could become recruits of al-Qaida’s global network.
Sociologists, among other analysts in the West, have until now failed to adequately explain why, for instance, someone like Mohammed Bouyeri, 27, born of Moroccan parents in Amsterdam, a very liberal and open city, became an Islamist and then remorselessly attacked and killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November last year, for making the film Submission exploring the status of women in Islam. (He admitted guilt at his trial this week and a verdict is due July 26.)
Any seriously credible explanation—essential for eventually eliminating the scourge of Islamism, as was done with communism—must take into account the deep-seated pathology in this culture now imported into the West.
The London bombings illustrate how urgent this task is for liberal democracies.
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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