Extremists’ violent perversion of religion threatens us all
On the eve of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic calendar, Muslim terrorists belonging to Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiah conducted suicide bombings on the island of Bali.
Then, on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni Muslim suicide bomber attacked a Shiite mosque in the Iraqi town of Hilla. Among worshippers gathered for prayers, 25 died and nearly 100 were wounded. Ramadan has seen an escalation of suicide bombings in Iraq prior to today’s vote on the country’s new constitution.
Following the Bali bombing, U.S. President George Bush delivered a major speech in Washington to the membership of the National Endowment for Democracy. He expressed most clearly and specifically—for the first time on record—who and what is the enemy the U.S. and its allies are fighting in the war on terror.
“Some call this Islamic radicalism; others, militant jihadism; still others Islamo-fascism,” Bush said. “Whatever it’s called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: The establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.”
With these remarks, Bush clarified what many of us Muslims know by our experience and the history of our faith tradition—that is, how greatly Muslims themselves have been terrorized through centuries by the same people who are now waging their indiscriminate war against those who refuse to accept their violently bigoted perversion of Islam.
Osama bin Laden is today the public face of this murderous ideology, whose first victims were members of the prophet Muhammad’s immediate family. The worldview of these murderers—irrespective of how they strive to link their acts to Islam—is starkly primitive. Their world consists of nominal Muslims, to be ruled by them as Taliban chief Mullah Omar ruled Afghanistan, and infidels against whom they must wage an endless war.
In Bali the infidels are Hindus; in Iraq the infidels are Shiites and misguided Kurds; for Palestinians, the infidels are Jews. Americans, Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and Hindu Indians are all infidels who are present inside, or inhabit the bordering lands of Muslims, particularly the Middle East. As enemies of radical Islamists, they are to be terrorized indiscriminately, as was the objective of the London bombers this past July, with the aim that they will be compelled to withdraw from lands considered Islamic.
The internal war within the Muslim world, which is as old as Islam itself, went savagely global in the final decades of the last century. On 9/11 this internal conflict among Muslims erupted inside the United States, awakening America to the international menace of radical Islam in much the same way as Japanese militarism did 60 years earlier at Pearl Harbor.
But there are legions of Americans and Europeans, with supporters elsewhere in other continents, who are wilfully blind and deaf to the reality of radical Islam that Bush has sought to make plain in his public remarks.
They continue to insist that the violence of Muslim terrorists, despite being despicable, must yet be explained by reference to some “root causes” linked with the history of Western colonial imperialism.
Hence, these “useful idiots” (in Lenin’s memorable phrase) give pause to the vast majority of Muslims—in particular those in North America and Europe—whose silence in the face of evil feeds the bloodlust of Muslim terrorists.
Bush is right when he says the “murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century.” It can only be met successfully, however, if we have learned sufficiently from 20th-century history.
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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