Some two weeks after the London bombings of July 7, a representative sample of Canadian Muslim religious leaders, or imams, came together at a Toronto mosque and issued a statement condemning violence done in the name of Islam by Muslim terrorists.
The statement signed by 120 imams read, in part: “Anyone who claims to be a Muslim and participates in any way in the taking of innocent life is betraying the spirit and letter of Islam.”
The CBC website, in posting the statement, characterized it as “an unprecedented move.”
The more astute assessment, however, was provided by a Muslim woman in attendance who observed, when asked by a reporter, that the statement was “a very positive step, but it’s only a small step in the right direction.”
In fact, the problem Canada is now confronting from Muslim terrorism is far greater and more intractable than these imams were prepared to admit.
Indeed, a close reading of their statement discloses how mindfully the imams censored themselves in what seems to me, at least, to have been largely a public relations exercise.
There was no mention in the statement of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network of terrorists, with branches and members, according to CSIS, located in Canada.
Lived in Montreal
The millennium bomber, Ahmed Ressam of Algerian origin and associated with al-Qaida, made his home in Montreal.
From there he headed out to bomb the Los Angeles airport, when he was thankfully caught while trying to cross into the United States from British Columbia.
The failure to name bin Laden and condemn without equivocation his ideology and politics that find support among a considerable segment of Muslims worldwide, is revealing of what too many Canadian imams have failed to do since the scourge of Muslim terrorism blighted their faith tradition.
Canadian imams are not unaware of declarations issued over the past decade by bin Laden as directives of war in the name of Islam against the West, described as Crusader states in alliance with the Zionists.
Surely they know of bin Laden’s threat issued on November 12, 2002, in which Canada was cited as an al-Qaida target.
Hence, signatories of the statement should explain their silence in respect to bin Laden and al-Qaida and their failure to condemn by name Muslim terrorist organizations that have sowed death and destruction from Palestine to Kashmir, from Spain to Indonesia.
Changing direction
The truth of the matter is that many imams, both in North America and Europe, now find themselves in the unenviable position of striving to dissociate themselves from their own past thinking and preaching to immigrant Muslim communities.
In many cases, they condoned the kind of politics which bin Laden patented into an ideology of Muslim terror.
Some mosques in Canada, as in Britain and elsewhere, have provided a haven for the ideology of political Islam to be nurtured, extolled and proselytized.
For more than 30 years in Canada, I was not the only one who listened during Friday prayers to Imams intemperately preaching bigoted sermons laced with anti-Semitism.
Since September 11, 2001, in refusing to remain silent, I stopped going to those mosques.
Imams bear great responsibility for shaping the psychology of young Muslim men, such as those bombers born in Britain, offering themselves as sacrificial pawns in an al-Qaida inspired war against the West.
To be fair, the statement condemning terrorism by Canadian imams is a small and positive step, but is also a belated one and much more is required to combat the plague of Muslim terrorism.
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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