Liberals in the Muslim world and the West must denounce terrorism as it is.

Prof. Salim Mansur, professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario and a prominent IndoCanadian scholar, recently pointed out in The Ottawa Sun: "There are two denials working in tandem at least since Sept. 11, 2001, that undermine liberal-democracies and their efforts to eliminate Islamic militancy from our world. One denial is the Muslim majority refusing to denounce without equivocation the thugs from Osama bin Laden to the street corner spokesman for al-Qaeda The other denial is the liberal 'white man' refusing to speak clearly about wrongs of the other -- the 'non-white' -- and, especially, when such wrongs as Islamic terrorism places in peril everyone without any distinction of ethnicity, gender and belief."

Prof. Mansur points out that the Muslim denial to confront the ugly reality stems from "the fear of being labelled an 'apostate' by other Muslims." The "white man's" denial is the result from the fear of being labelled as a "racist". Prof. Mansur writes: "This fear is bound up with the liberal or 'white man's' guilt over the past sins of Europe's colonial-imperial history."

An Afro-American scholar, Shelby Steele, at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, has also written about the "white man's guilt. "Today, the white West," writes Prof. Steele, "lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down in withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there was once unquestionable authority." The Muslim world must find a way to get rid of this lack of resolve to condemn this religiously-incited terrorism which is doing more harm to the Muslims in their own countries as evidenced by the slaughter by the Sunni extremists of their fellow Shiite Muslims and vice versa in Iraq, the unspeakable brutality of Hamas toward the fellow Palestinians who support Fatah and never-ending attacks by the Taleban against the Pakistani armed forces which actually helped to create the Taleban.

These violent acts must be condemned without equivocation if the Muslim world is ever to stem this never-ending bloodletting of fellow Sunnis and Shiites. The Western liberals, for their part, must realise that the present generations cannot be blamed for the deeds and misdeeds of the earlier generations and must give up their guilt-complex and treat the nonwhites as equals and not as victims of sins committed long ago.

Mahmood Elahi Ottawa, Canada