In a brilliant account of medieval Europe, William Manchester provided a glimpse in A World Only Lit By Fire of how nearly six centuries of what is known as the Dark Ages engulfed a continent.
Rome, as the proud city of the ancient world, was not simply overwhelmed by the swarming hordes of barbarians from the east, but a civilization long in the making swiftly was ruined. It was undone from within by a population that lost its sense of purpose while forgetting its history, and a ruling elite corrupted by self indulgence beyond repair.
The West, as was ancient Rome, is besieged, and those encircling the West at present make no pretence of their intent to tear it down as reparation for past sins that occurred in the making of the modern world.
But the swarming hordes of the anti-West axis – unlike those that overran Rome and its empire – do not gather at the frontiers of the West. Instead they assemble within the modern day temple of rank hypocrisy, the United Nations, and from there launch their assault against the civilization whose wonders they greedily seek, as did their barbarian predecessors invading Rome.
The UN conference on racism in Geneva, Switzerland is the modern day effort of an increasingly supine West at negotiating the price for being left alone by the rapacious thuggish leaders of failed and rogue states of the Third World.
It is the weakening of the West’s moral centre – the abject unwillingness to defend its history which on balance has given the longest lease on freedom and prosperity to the world – that was on display in Geneva.
The spectacle of several European diplomats walking out of the conference hall in Geneva as Iran’s President Ahmadinejad delivered his vile anti-Semitic anti-western rant, illustrated the pathetic disarray of Europe’s frantic diplomacy to negotiate a face-saving agreement with the world’s worst human rights violators.
The West ironically needs reminding itself of Marx’s words, “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” And in Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels celebrated the advance of capitalism over all previous systems of economic activity.
Instead of hosting such fraudulent conferences as Durban II in Geneva, it is time the West demonstrated its moral authority by demanding from the likes of Ahmadinejad and his anti-West allies to answer why they have denied their people freedom to fully embrace the proven model for prosperity that is the West.
In respect to Israel, it is a beacon of modern enlightenment restored to its ancient home and a reflecting mirror in which the Arab-Muslim world sees daily its appalling failure as a civilization that once merited respect.
Moreover, the intensity of the anti-Semitic rage that Ahmadinejad displayed in Geneva serves the Arab-Muslim rulers to hold others responsible for their people’s misery.
The Third World needs more of the West despite its flaws – ask the Chinese and the Indians – if their poor are to escape the oppressiveness of their traditional cultures.
The West needs to recover urgently its moral centre for it is only moral criterion – as once Alexander Solzhenitsyn counselled the West against communism – which can help contain and defeat the contemporary enemies of freedom.
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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