PARIS – During the Ides of March, the City of Light glows with anticipation of spring. But this year it is deceptively calm, and behind its gaiety lurks doubts and fear for the future.
I am in Paris – a city I am always joyful to visit – attending a conference on European security in the post-9/11 world of radical Islamism and the war on terror.
It has been a gathering of a few politicians, journalists, academics and community activists, and behind the formal presentations our informal discussions have invariably turned to the peril that France and her neighbours sense is upon them since the suburbs of Paris turned violent and ugly last autumn.
Following the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, France and the rest of Europe initially rallied behind the United States. Newspaper headlines in Paris read: “Nous sommes Americains (We are Americans).”
But such feelings of solidarity with an America assaulted by terrorists dissipated when President George Bush decided to take the war declared on the U.S. by Osama bin Laden into the heartland of the terror network, first Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Then France’s President Jacques Chirac, unlike Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, decided to make France the leading opponent of the United States at the United Nations against the war for regime change in Iraq.
Behind Chirac’s decision to oppose Bush lurked the long-held belief among a segment of French politicians and intellectuals of making France “une puissance musulmane” – a Muslim power – by drawing the Arab-Muslim world under her wings.
Charles De Gaulle, France’s war hero and founder of the fifth Republic, adopted this belief as a strategic policy after taking France out of Algeria, and then tilted Paris in support of the Arab countries following their debacle in the June 1967 war with Israel.
Chirac is De Gaulle’s pupil, and his role in shaping Gaullist policy for the Middle East amounts to a case study in stoking the ambitions of Arab dictators, most notoriously that of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The Gaullist ambition is to have France head a coalition of countries as a counterweight to what Parisian intellectuals view as an intolerable hegemony of the United States in world affairs.
Chirac and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who seems to me to be nursing a nostalgia for Napoleon’s fleeting glory, also believed that in opposing Bush’s drive to bring democracy to Iraq, they would buy security for France from politics of radical Islamists.
But Europe has failed to buy security. On the contrary, France is learning that the agenda of radical Islamists is being supported by Iran, whose bid for nuclear power has so far been uncontainable by European diplomacy.
In Lebanon Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister and friend of Chirac, was killed by Syrian agents. With this murder, a message was delivered to Paris not to mess with the Damascus/Tehran axis in the Middle East and its Lebanese proxy, the Hezbollah.
Moreover, a cluster of events – the bombings in Madrid and London, the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the riots in the suburbs of Paris, the torture and murder of a young Parisian Jew (Ilan Halimi), a resurgence of anti-Semitic violence, the intimidation of Muslims (particularly women) by Islamists, and the effects of the recent controversy over Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed – have seemingly brought Europe to a tipping point. At last, it is awakening to the perils of a new form of totalitarianism within its borders.
In Paris this year, I sense, spring comes as a ghoulish reminder of another time when Europe watched and wondered how France would respond to a deathly menace.
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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