The near-unanimity of gushing adulation in the Canadian media over the inaugural speech of Michaelle Jean as Canada’s newest governor general, illustrated unambiguously the country’s fourth estate is the ruling Liberal party’s public relations firm at a safe distance.
The tone was set by Andrew Coyne of the National Post, who has a reputation of being a fair-minded observer of the national scene.
On hearing the inaugural address, he gushingly wrote: “Madam, I surrender. Let us forget past criticisms. Let us put aside old quarrels. Your speech has collapsed my defences.”
It was the Governor General’s meditation on freedom, her paean to liberty, recalling her past when “ancestors were slaves,” that struck a chord with Coyne and his peers awakening a music in them they had not heard for a long time. There was nothing phony in Jean’s story of her journey from an impoverished island to a generous country, and where she now stands as a symbol of the eternal quest of individuals to actualize their potential by acquiring freedom.
It’s also true the present generation of Canadians, under a long Liberal dispensation, has forgotten the meaning of freedom, and the sacrifices that generations of Canadians endured to bring liberty to parts of Europe from the most evil tyranny in history.
Jean is, moreover, a Liberal appointment, who made her home in Quebec and a career with Radio-Canada. She married a Quebecois whose life was spent at least in the margins of Quebec separatist politics, and then got the sensibilities of a modern Canadian Liberal who’ll make of any vice a virtue to preserve the perpetual grip of the party’s hold on power.
Her speech would’ve remained admirable, her message flawless, if she had resisted the temptation not to sully her prosody with a reference to our southern neighbour that was unwarranted.
In speaking of the fragility of our planet exposed by natural disasters, Jean remarked: “And as is universally the case in such circumstances, we have seen emerge entire segments of a population, among the most destitute, men and women who had nowhere to go. Dispossessed, with no points of reference, facing sheer devastation, even utter dismay. Such images we have seen before – from Darfur, from Haiti, from Niger. And this time they came from New Orleans, from the margins of an affluent society.”
By what measure, we may ask, can a natural catastrophe and its ensuing tragedy as in New Orleans be equated with humanly engineered calamities such as the genocide perpetrated by the Sudanese government in Darfur, or the appalling crimes of murderous regimes in Haiti, or the callous disregard of rulers for their people that makes for famine in Niger?
It’s possible Jean was unaware her remarks were gratuitous. It has become a habit of Liberal politicians, and the lib-left crowd in this country, to insult Americans as a self-congratulatory show of juvenile patriotism.
But then such nonsense, insulting to Canada’s most important ally and trading partner, delivered by the Governor General, the representative of the Crown, reflects how greatly advanced has become this disease of anti-Americanism in the ranks of our country’s rulers and their acolytes in the media.
Canadians deserve better from their representatives in government, and critical perspective from their media that is never obscured by gushing sentiments. And Jean should well remember an individual, or a country, cannot aspire to greatness by belittling another gratuitously.
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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