On the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, I am reminded how fickle is memory and understanding of events that shape history in a liberal democracy such as ours.
In a remarkable little book from a generation ago—The Book of Laughter and Forgetting published in 1979—Milan Kundera, a Czech writer fleeing his native home from Communist rule for Paris, France, reflected on the fragility of memory.
Kundera wrote: “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”
Forgetting is a means by which people seek escape from the nightmares of the past and look to the future for redemption, transcendence and happiness. The liberal idea of progress and of an implicit faith in transforming human nature for the better is future oriented, and the past is deemed best as archived if not forgotten.
Six years is a mere blip in history, yet that morning in September 2001 has faded from memory and with it an understanding of what brought the Islamist terrorists to strike America’s heartland.
The attacks on that September morning were not the first shots fired as a declaration of war by Islamists against the United States and the West.
This war started much earlier, most notably with the 1979 revolution in Iran and the taking of American diplomats in Tehran as hostage for 444 days by the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Khomeini, an Islamist Lenin, raged with the memory of both recent and distant past.
For Khomeini the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s prime minister, in 1953 was the work of the CIA and America needed to be punished.
But beyond vengeance Khomeini sought re-constituting the past for Iran driven by the memory of the pre-modern power and glory of the Islamic civilization, and with a burning hatred of all things modern or originating in the West.
For Khomeini and the Islamists—Osama bin Laden and his followers—the past is their future, and any deviation from that past needs to be expunged by making war in the present.
It does not matter to Islamists how anachronistic pre-modern glory of Islamic civilization would be today, how repulsive the practice of segregating women in society or discriminating against religious minorities.
Liberal democracy, however, recoils from the past for it sees only its faults. It imagines instead a future as a clean sheet on which to imprint its ideals.
But if that future is to remain protected then those who are its sworn enemies—as are the present day Islamists as were the German fascists of the last century—need to be decisively defeated.
Liberal democracy is no less an armed ideology than Islamist ideology, and liberals forgetting this elementary fact disarm themselves for an eventual surrender to those who reject a liberal future and make war against it in the present.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Americans awoke to a war in progress.Six years later the question hanging in balance is whether Americans and their allies will end this war on their terms or concede defeat to Islamists.
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.
- Israel: Decades-old conflict not about to cease - Saturday November 24, 2012 at 1:56 pm
- The better man lost the U.S. election - Saturday November 10, 2012 at 9:16 am
- The puzzle in U.S. presidential elections - Saturday November 3, 2012 at 8:43 am
