PARIS—From Europe, the perils and fear of radical Islamism in Canada seem remote. This is the continent upon which Islamist warriors have set their eyes in their war against the West, and caused real damage from Madrid and London to the suburbs of the City of Light.
I arrived here earlier in the week to find Europe in the grip of the quadrennial fever of the month-long World Cup festivities.
As I sip my morning coffee in sidewalk cafes, the main stories in the daily papers are about football (soccer) and its subtleties, analyzed by the best minds of Europe.
The excitement over hockey’s Stanley Cup in Canada, or any other North American sport, pales in comparison with the passion and frenzy of football fans.
This game of kicking, heading and chasing a ball down a green rectangle by men in shorts has a truly global audience, and its star performers are admired by slum dwellers and wealthy patrons alike across five continents.
Still, it remains for now largely a European affair. The tournament began with 32 teams, some from Africa and Asia. These were pretenders—such as the teams from Saudi Arabia, Iran or Togo—among the serious squads from Europe and Latin America, where kicking the ball is a science of bending it from 18 yards or more above heads of defenders into the goal.
David Beckham, the English captain, did just such a thing before an audience of more than a billion television fans around the world. He saved his reputation from those football analysts in London who had doubted his usefulness to the team, and tore out the hearts of poor Ecuadorans as their gallant men lost their pursuit of World Cup glory.
With the quarter-final round under way, the hope of football’s planetary fans outside of Europe rests on Brazil’s 11 men, led by the ingenious Ronaldo, keeping the game alive in the joy and fancy of third-world children whose parents can barely buy them daily meals.
The different attitude to football here speaks to how greatly and asymmetrically the world is really divided. In North America, women also play soccer; in Europe, it is a man’s game with women cheering deliriously—and in the rest of the world, particularly in Africa, football remains the most accessible exit for a young man without a job to achieve riches on a field of dreams.
European teams now scout for African players to entertain fans in Manchester, Milan or Munich, much as Roman scouts once went looking for African gladiators to entertain Roman senators.
I cannot help but ponder over coffee how the world has changed, measured by the game of football. Once upon a time—barely a century ago, when football’s World Cup competition first began—the roar of “Rule Britannia, Rule” meant the sun never set upon the British Empire.
Now what remains of Great Britain, an England of Tony Blair and David Beckham, is reduced to 11 men in football gear barely surviving against plucky players from former colonies.
Similarly, France, still mesmerized by Napoleonic glory, anticipates with Gallic bravado another Waterloo as the French squad prepares to play magicians from Brazil—and I sense Europe right now is far more fearful of losing football supremacy than it is of being in the cross-hairs of the madmen of Islamist terror.
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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