Mansur - Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism

Clear thinkers are rare, and so are powerful polemicists. Courageous human beings are rarer still, but the rarest of all is to find the three combined in one person. Meet Salim Mansur. George Jonas

A brilliant academic and thought-provoking journalist, Salim Mansur explains what liberal democracy really means, and why the protection of individual rights that lies at its heart is under constant assault from the group think mentality of state-imposed multiculturalism. Lorrie Goldstein, Senior Associate Editor, Toronto Sun

Professor Salim Mansur is a man of exceptional courage, powerful insight, and possessed of both a delightful and energetic prose style Rex Murphy, The Point of View on CBC The National , and host of CBC Radio One, Cross Country Checkup

In an age of ideological conformity such as ours, it takes courage to speak against the prevailing orthodoxy. This is a courageous book. Professor Mansur exposes how multiculturalism corrodes the values and traditions that sustain Canada as a liberal democratic order. The result is a book to galvanize Canadians against the apostles of extremist progressivism. Robert Sibley, Ottawa Citizen and adjunct professor in political science at Carleton University

Salim Mansur has the courage to state clearly and openly what many have chosen to ignore: that the multiculturalism project is flawed at its very core. We would all benefit in reading him carefully. Richard Bastien, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Observer

Canada led the Western world into the multicultural mire in 1988, ironically under a Conservative government. Salim Mansurs deep and scintillating analysis should help the country out of this illiberal and unfortunate policy. Daniel Pipes, PhD, president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University

Dont wait for the movie. All the elements needed to entertain and instruct are already present in Mansurs book: incisive rendering, a great plot, a host of interesting characters, sharp ideas and important revelations. Only the book can do justice to itself. Salim Mansur is one of the few, reliable go-to Muslim scholars in the field of Islamic studies. David Solway, essayist and author of 20 books including Chess Pieces and The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism and Identity

As a Muslim exponent of freedom and democracy who immigrated to Canada from war-torn South Asia in 1974, Prof. Salim Mansur is uniquely well qualified to evaluate multiculturalism. Western policy makers would do well to heed his timely warning that this misguided policy could lead over time to the unravelling of a liberal democracy, such as Canada, and the ultimate meltdown of its own historically evolved identity. Rory Leishman, author of Against Judicial Activism: The Decline of Freedom and Democracy in Canada

With this important book, Professor Mansur, himself an immigrant to Canada (a brown guy as he puts it), has fired a daring and resounding shot across the bow of the Canadian ship of public opinion by explaining, in crystal clear prose, why multicultural policy has brought discord instead of unity to our once-peaceable kingdom. Public debate over a whole range of official orthodoxies has been increasingly impoverished in recent decades, and we can only hope that this book, so unafraid and stimulating, will plant us firmly on the road back to the open society we once enjoyed. W.D. Gairdner, author of The Trouble with Canada...Still!

Salim Mansur presents a devastating critique of multiculturalism that is unusual in two big ways. The first is that he is surprisingly sympathetic with many of the intentions behind it, and charitable even when he cannot be sympathetic. The second is the way he goes beyond the conventions and platitudes of a policy wonk survey, with sharp, organizing insights of the kind we might expect from a fine historian, or even novelist. He does not merely analyse. He has lived the implications of multicultural policy, and he has looked people who have experienced real dislocation, in the eye. He has thought and felt his way into radically other points of view. There is a sincerity and genuineness in his account that holds ones attention, and makes one care. David Warren, Ottawa Citizen

Published by
Mantua Books
Brantford Ontario N3T 6J9
www.mantuabooks.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mansur, Salim
Delectable lie : a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism / Salim Mansur.
ISBN 978-0-9869414-0-5
1. Multiculturalism. 2. Multiculturalism--Political aspects. 3. Multiculturalism--Canada. I. Title.
HM1271.M35 2011 305.8 C2011-905354-3
Copyright Salim Mansur 2011
Cover art by S.H. Rotberg
The publisher acknowledges, with thanks, the assistance of the International Free Press Society Canada. It is prohibited to copy any portion of this publication in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for short quotations for review purposes.
for Ben Singer, respected colleague and dear friend Delectable Lie 1 Introduction Delectable Lie 1

The origin of freedom lies in breathing. Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize in Literature 1981

Freedom is readily understood by most people, and especially by people confined to dwell under conditions where their own wishes on how to live their lives and speak their thoughts are constrained. There should be no mystery about what freedom is, and what it means. It is as simple and necessary as breathing is to living. Though philosophers and theologians have discussed the matter in their learned roles, people individually and collectively know instinctively when they are unable to live freely. History begins, it might be said, with the quest for freedom. It is as ancient as when Moses led his people, the Jews, from exile under the oppressive rule of the Pharaoh in Egypt into freedom, and as recent as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 that marked the end of communist rule in divided Europe. The universal thirst for freedom symbolized, for instance, in the iconic image of the solitary individual standing unarmed in front of advancing tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, China, or in the story of the self-immolation by a despairing and humiliated fruit-seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, that sparked an uprising in his native Tunisia against dictatorship and heralded the Arab Spring of 2011 for freedom against despotic rule in countries of the Middle East and North Africa is a commonly understood language across cultures.

And yet freedom remains a contested idea among individuals and in society. Its quest has been regularly frustrated by the more immediate needs or equality in society. The demand for equality as a remedy for historys injustices is irresistible in all societies, and has been the motive force for reform and revolution. This is increasingly so in the age of democracy, as is ours. The idea of equality being hugely potent, it frequently trumps the idea of freedom in the march of history.

In our time the ideology of multiculturalism the set of ideas that all cultures are equal and deserving of equal treatment in a liberal democracy such as Canada is linked to the pressing demand for equality in Western societies as these become increasingly multiethnic due to immigration and open borders.

When first proposed, the idea of an official multiculturalism program to be sponsored by the state, supported by taxpayers, and monitored and enforced by thought-police (human rights commissions) was at best dubious, and at worst is by its very nature poised against Western liberalism. Moreover, as mentioned, it was based on the false idea another official lie, really that all cultures are equal. However, that is an orthodoxy of the last century increasingly dismissed by serious thinkers. That is because there are established criteria making it possible to judge the achievements of all cultures, whether in the arts and literature, religion, philosophy, technology, modes of governance, or science; but the primary criterion that makes possible all human achievement is freedom.