The West’s demographic decline is accompanied by the weakening of traditional faith in Christianity. The United States among all the advanced industrial democracies of the West bucks this trend.
A 2002 survey by the Pew Research Centre in Washington on the attitude of wealthy nations towards religion, found that affluence had a correlation with declining belief. The exception again was the U.S.
The Pew survey found that six out of 10 Americans, or 60%, reported religion being important in their lives. The figures from Britain, Italy, Germany and France were 33%, 27%, 21% and 11% respectively. The figure for Canada was 30%.
The vast majority of faith-driven Americans accounted for in the Pew survey reside in flyover country. This is Middle America where religion, guns and patriotism rule, and where the politics of post-modernism have not yet corroded the pride in “American exceptionalism.”
Middle America also is the spine holding erect the West, or what remains of it, that resists the supineness of those quite willing to appease the forces of collectivism and anti-freedom as these regularly resurface in different guises, most recently in the various shades of Islamism.
How Middle America votes in November most likely will decide which of the two men—John Sidney McCain III or Barack Hussein Obama—will reside in the White House for the next four years. Among the many issues in this year’s hugely important U.S. presidential election—Iraq, the war against Islamist terror, soaring oil prices, economy, jobs, nuclear proliferation, Iran, Supreme Court justices—it is identity politics courtesy of the Democrats that might very well determine the outcome of the November vote.
Divided and angry
The Democratic primary this year was an unalloyed slugfest of identity politics, of race against gender, with race squeaking out a win for Obama that has left the Democrats—despite the brave face of its leaders and mainstream media chums—divided and angry.
Obama is, as I noted before, an empty suit that caught the winds of periodic American discontent. Now Obama has a record revealed in the primaries of association with individuals (e.g. Bill Ayers, the former indicted terrorist of the Weather Underground, or Antoin Rezko indicted and convicted of mail fraud and money laundering), membership in a church where black theology regularly was preached by a bigoted pastor (Rev. Jeremiah Wright), and remarks such as folks who “cling” to religion and guns are “bitter” people.
This record will be discussed and ruminated over across Middle America in the campaign for the November vote as it was not during the Democratic primary. In Middle America this record will matter for it is revealing of the man wearing an empty suit, and people of faith owning guns will decide who they want as their president to represent America to the world.
All politics as some wise guys have said in the past tend to be local. A great many people around the world are cheering for Obama, prominent among them are the usual hate-America crowd of the left and the Arab-Muslim world.
But it is Americans who vote for their president, and Middle America remains mightily skeptical of Obama whose heavily left-leaning politics his media friends will do best to obscure
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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