As Americans stopped to mark the 11th anniversary of 9/11, and ponder how much the world has changed during these years, an ocean away more terrorist attacks were mounted on American interests in the Middle East.
The attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya resulting in the murder of Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador, with three members of his staff and several Libyans, was an act of war by men indoctrinated with the same ideology of those who carried out the 9/11 attacks.
Osama bin Laden is dead and so is Ayatollah Khomeini, but the war they declared against the “satanic” West continues. The West, on the other hand, has opted to be an ostrich.
The result is more than a decade after hijacked jetliners plowed into tall buildings in New York, Islamists are ascendant across the Middle East and hoisting their Shariah-based totalitarian ideology. The U.S. under the Obama administration stands instead as having reverted back to the pre-9/11 mentality.
The American election is barely seven weeks away and the Islamist jihad against the “Crusaders,” in the language of al-Qaida’s founder, will very likely get obscured in the fog of political debates and recriminations in the U.S.
But there is no mistaking that an apologetic West, as represented by President Obama, emboldened the Islamists, resulting in the manner in which the so-called Arab Spring unfolded.
The abandonment of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt accompanied by the embrace of Muslim Brotherhood is turning out to be a repeat of Iran in 1979 when Khomeini swept into power.
It is extraordinary that an apologetic America, as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo symbolized, and Europe with its appeasement mind-set cannot get their act together in compelling a third world rogue state, Iran, to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons capability or face dire military consequences. This failure to disarm Iran while embracing Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — the political grandfather of all the various Islamist offsprings in the greater Middle East and beyond — makes the present situation eerily similar to the 1930s.
What needs to be done, and should have been done by the previous Bush administration, is to take a page from George Kennan — the architect of President Truman’s policy against the Soviet Union — and update his strategy of containment for the Arab-Muslim world. The Arab-Muslim world deserves to be isolated and contained, as was the former Soviet Union. An Iron Curtain, in Winston Churchill’s memorable words, should descend separating the West and its allies from the Arab-Muslim world until the latter has exhausted itself of its own demons.
The situation America, and by its default the West, finds itself in relation to the Arab-Muslim world is to a large extent, ironically, the result of its own guilt-ridden attitude and political correctness. This state of mind, or multiculturalism, gravely inhibits a realistic assessment of 9/11 and what has followed.
The explanation on offer that this new wave of Muslim rage was ignited by a crudely amateurish docu-drama about Islam’s prophet, and the individual responsible must be severely punished, is pathetic in describing a guilt-ridden West seeking to placate the Arab-Muslim world.
Islamists are at war, and the West needs to respond accordingly.
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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