Just about everyone around the world has an opinion about the favoured outcome of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. An Environics poll from a few months ago indicated 70% of Canadians would vote for the Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Hussein Obama.
In the “Old Europe” where American soldiers fought and died to free at least half the continent from the clutches of fascists and keep it safe from the grasp of communists, the preference for Obama is the same as in Canada.
Across the rest of the world support for Obama mirrors that of Old Europe. I visited Indonesia earlier this year, and witnessed there that the overwhelming support for Obama is that for a native son as it would be in Kenya.
But it is for Americans to decide whom they send to the White House. This weekend across the great republic, especially in Middle America, families and friends will gather to discuss one final time the seriousness and consequences of their votes for the man they elect as president.
Middle America is the last indomitable frontier of freedom. Here American exceptionalism is lived in the daily routine of family and church. Here patriotism and honour are worn proudly in the spirit of Andrew Jackson, the victorious commander of the Union forces at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and the seventh president of the republic.
Middle America stands practically alone against the weight of the world, the heavily liberal-left oriented urban centres of the coastal United States, the blatantly in-your-face partisanship of the mainstream media for Obama, and the cultural/academic elites who spin the dominant narrative of American politics and society.
People here know deep inside their expansive hearts the candidate who represents them best. It is not Obama with his effete intellectualism, his mocking tone about those who cling to guns and religion, and his career shaped by the corrupt politics of Chicago.
It is not Obama associated with folks whose hate-America politics spew forth from church pulpits and in the sophistry of unrepentant terrorists. It is not Obama with the thin resume of a community organizer and attorney for an organization (ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) that has become synonymous for fraudulent voter registration across America, and whose pro-abortion record is furthest from Middle America’s pro-life values.
Middle America sees the faces of Libya’s Muammar Qaddhafi, Iran’s ayatollahs, Cuba’s Castro brothers, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and America’s foes cheering for Obama.
There is only one man in this election who served his country, bears the scars of war for America and would not let her enemies break him, and it is not Obama.
There are economic troubles and political discontent within America. There is a gathering storm beyond America’s shores. But Middle America has lived the history of freedom and discord and recognizes of the two candidates the one who will protect, unapologetically, American values. He is Senator John Sidney McCain III.
Across Middle America men and women will head out to vote their individual conscience. And their votes will indicate to the world how strong remains the idea of American exceptionalism and love of freedom across the United States.
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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