The only surprising thing about the recent remark by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that “Israel must be wiped off the map,” is that so many people in the West are surprised.
Ahmadinejad’s remarks were made in a speech delivered ahead of the annual “Jerusalem Day”—it coincides, on instructions of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, once leader of the Iran’s clerical regime, with the fourth Friday of the fasting month of Ramadan in the Islamic calendar—to a gathering of the who’s who of the global Muslim terrorist network funded and directed by authorities in Tehran.
Ahmadinejad was merely repeating the political line formulated by Khomeini’s regime—which, stripped of its ideological cover, was totalitarian. Like the Bolshevik regime in Russia and Mao’s in China, Iran continues to brook no internal dissent while supporting radical Islamism beyond its borders.
The animus towards Israel is the glue holding together various Muslim terrorist organizations, such as the Palestinian Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah, al Qaida’s global network, Iraqi insurgents directed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, various Pakistani groups, etc., whose internal sectarian rivalry is no less bloody-minded than their anti-Semitism. Enmity towards Israel is the only thing radical Islamists and secular fascists (for instance, Syrian Baathists) share in common even as they fight each other—as did Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Khomeini’s Iran for nearly a decade.
If there were doubts in the West before 9/11 of what radical Islamism represents, there should be none now. This is a political ideology which is no more representative of traditional Islam than the Ku Klux Klan is representative of traditional Christianity.
But while the KKK is contemptibly relegated to the bigoted margins of America, the plague of radical Islamism has become the destructively dominant political force within the Arab-Muslim world—at least since the 1979 revolution that brought Khomeini to power in Iran.
Khomeini declared war on the United States (called the “Great Satan”) and Israel (called the “Little Satan”) once his clerical regime got itself installed. This regime and its apologists have not obscured their political aims—of acquiring nuclear weapons for their own survival while endangering the survival of Israel—behind diplomatic gobbledygook.
Ahmadinejad cannot be faulted for speaking plainly and informing the world unambiguously what the regime intends to do once it acquires the capability to act accordingly.
But the wonder, and horror, surrounding contemporary Iran is the extent to which western democracies have engaged in a policy of appeasement driven by commercial greed—and an unwillingness to take the measures required to disarm a maniacal regime before any harm is done.
Iranians opposed to the clerical regime have been intimidated, imprisoned, killed or driven out into exile. But Iranians who sense the peril into which Khomeinism is pushing their country continue to speak out.
One such Iranian is, ironically, Hossein Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini. Soon after Iraq was liberated he arrived in Najaf, Shiite Islam’s holiest city, and announced, “Just like the Iraqis, the Iranians are desperate to be free and if all other methods fail they may welcome American military intervention.”
Christopher Hitchens, the widely published and respected author, writing in Vanity Fair of his visit to Iran, quotes Hossein’s remarks to him: “Only the Free World, led by America, can bring democracy to Iran.”
The free world, however, confused by the muddled thinking of the lib-left in politics and media, might act, if the past is any guide, only when the cost of inaction becomes unavoidably steep.
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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