Wake Up, Canada!

Salim Mansur (no "blinkered intellectual," he) thinks Canadians treat freedom far too cavalierly. He hopes Canada's rejection at the UN will shake us from our torpor and prompt us to reassess who we really are:

...Canada is not merely a vast real estate stretching across five time zones. It is deeply embedded culturally and civilizationally in what is the West.

This means Canadians firmly and unapologetically understand and defend, as they did in the past, what marks out the West from the rest of the world.

The one element that defines and distinguishes the West as it evolved — let us say over the past half-millennium that runs through the Age of Discovery, Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution and culturally reaches back to ancient Athens, Jerusalem and Rome — is freedom, and freedom is what makes possible all that we so casually take for granted.

Freedom is fragile. But, in the West, freedom’s candle has remained burning as long as it has due to the immense sacrifices of so many in protecting it against those determined to snuff it.

Twice in the last century, and within living memory, totalitarian enemies of freedom — Nazis and Communists — mobilized their resources against freedom and the West.

In our time, Islamists are the ideological successors of Nazis and Communists, and similarly they oppose the freedom the West represents.

Their ideology, Islamism, like bolshevism, is disguised as religion — Islam — and this imperils the West from the inside.

If Canadians are unsure about who they are in the deep sense of belonging to a distinct culture and civilization, then it follows they will remain confused about friends and foes while they are inundated with a diet of pablum-like “good news” stories of globalization.

Moreover, the UN remains, as it was during the Cold War years, the strategic theatre of struggle between friends and foes of freedom.

It was a wake-up call on 9/11, reminding the West, and Canada, how freedom is once again in the crosshairs of its totalitarian foe...

Good thing Mansur (a professor at London's Western U) didn't attempt to make such provocative statements from, say, a podium in the London Convention Centre. Not that he'd have been able to--"security concerns," don't you know.