There are two denials working in tandem at least since Sept. 11, 2001, that undermine liberal-democracies and their efforts to eliminate the scourge of Islamist brigandage from our world.
One denial is the Muslim majority refusing to denounce without equivocation the Islamist thugs from Osama bin Laden down to the street-corner spokesman for al Qaida, or similar organizations—and their apologists from Sheikh al Qaradawi featured on the Arab television al Jazeerah down to the prayer leader in the local mosque—for being “warmongers of darkness” at war with the modern civilization and Islam.
This Muslim denial to confront the now ugly reality of their world emanates in large measure from fear of the “a-word” and what then might follow.
The fear of being labelled an “apostate” by other Muslims, or Muslim authority, cripples the Muslim mind to silence and inaction when confronted with what is undeniably wrong gets espoused in the name of Islam.
While this fear can be explained at length sociologically and historically—it goes back to the first century of Islam when majority of Arab-Muslims, for instance, prayed behind the leadership that sanctioned the murder of members of the Prophet Muhammad’s family instead of repudiating such leaders and their apologists in mosques—one of its effects is an erosion of trust between non-Muslims and Muslims of which I wrote last week.
The other denial is the liberal “white man” refusing to speak clearly about the wrongs of the other—the “non-white”—and, especially, when such wrongs as Islamist terrorism places in peril everyone without any distinction of ethnicity, gender and belief.
The “white man’s” denial these days is framed as being politically correct, and the aversion of being incorrect comes from the fear to get labelled with the “b” or “r”-words as a “bigot” or “racist.”
There could be nothing worse for a liberal “white man” than being called a racist. It stupefies him into incoherence as the deer is frozen into inaction when caught in the headlights of an approaching car.
This fear is bound up with the liberal or “white man’s” guilt over the past sins of Europe’s colonial-imperial history—the 500 years since Christopher Columbus’s voyage represented in this “liberal” version of the “revised” world history as an unrelenting abuse and exploitation by the “white man” of Asians, Africans and the indigenous populations of the Americas, Australia and the far-flung islands of the Pacific.
Shelby Steele at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, has written most incisively about the “white guilt” and what it has meant in terms of race relations in America since the 1960s, or when it becomes necessary to fight in defending freedom.
“Today, the white West,” writes the Afro-American Steele, “lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there was once unquestioned authority.”
America’s retreat from Vietnam was somewhat hastened by white guilt, and the foreseen consequences for the Vietnamese mattered little to those who sought America’s defeat in south-east Asia.
Similarly, the full-throated cry of “liberal” penitence subverts the West’s ability to defeat terrorists and their sponsors in Iraq and elsewhere. Between the two denials at work, Islamist murderers reap their harvest of the innocent dead.
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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