The appearance of Osama bin Laden in a taped video speech on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, and ahead of the U.S. Congressional hearings of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s reports on the situation in Iraq, could not have been a mere coincidence.
It was timed to send the message that simply by not being killed or captured by American forces bin Laden, and the Islamist movement he symbolizes, remains unbeaten.
From here the leap for his followers and sympathizers in the Arab-Muslim world is simple: to remain unbeaten despite the odds means eventually to triumph by relentlessly engaging in terrorism as the tool of asymmetrical warfare against the West.
The thought of a man hiding in a cave somewhere in the remote mountains of the Hindu Kush and being sufficiently potent to eventually bring about the collapse of the United States and the West, as the once mighty Soviet Union was driven over the precipice, is surely a joke to most people.
But the world view of bin Laden or, for instance, the leaders of Iran, is as remote to the scribes of the mainstream media—including a majority of intellectual and political elites—in the West as a cave in the Hindu Kush is remote to apartment dwellers in New York or Toronto.
In bin Laden’s world view it is as if only yesterday history unfolded when a man taken to meditating in mountain caves of remote Arabia was called upon as a prophet to preach a divine message, and his followers in spreading that message far and wide defeated mighty powers to build empires of their own.
In the world view of bin Laden, anything is likely, provided there are men of conviction and devotion to the sort of belief he espouses, and in their steadfastness such men can then become agents of supernatural forces not bound by natural law to do unimaginable things such as bringing down the World Trade Center in New York.
There was a time when the West had a faith of its own—Christianity—and its teachings as presented by the church sufficiently ambiguous and flexible to make the people formidable warriors for over a thousand years.
It was when the West outgrew its faith—learning from its own history of the price paid by allowing faith to trump reason—it acquired paradoxically the capacity to become far more muscular than ever before, and yet increasingly prudent and reticent to use its muscles against adversaries.
How can a secular society that draws its faith from reason deal with men, such as bin Laden, and the threat they pose with complete disregard to any norm except their own?
Six years after 9/11 most people in the West are still reluctant to take bin Laden’s world view seriously while denigrating those who do.
But taking bin Laden’s world view seriously is the prerequisite to confining him forever in his cave, and in draining the swamps of tyranny and bigotry inside the Arab-Muslim world help to eliminate the refuge of his followers.
Both measures are needed for the West to prevail over bin Laden, his followers and their world view for its own interests and for the good of others including those of the Arab-Muslim world.
This is what United States President George Bush understood on surveying the smoking ground zero of 9/11. His critics do not.
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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