Believing is seeing

18 minutes.  That’s all it took for a CiF piece by Lionel Shriver, which warned Hillary Clinton that only a U.S. policy based on “realpolitik” can persuade Iran not to develop nuclear weapons, to produce a comment beneath the piece actually arguing that the world has it all wrong, and Iran is not actually pursing nukes, from someone named JamesDickins. (Apparently, the whole nuclear “thing” has all just been one big comical, Three’s Company-style, misunderstanding)

Dickins then executes a very awkward narrative pivot (the judges will penalize him harshly for that!) to demonize, yes, of course, Israel – characterizing the region’s only true democracy as the real threat to peace in the region. He even manages to throw in an “ethnic cleansing” charge at the end (an anti-Israel invective which, as anyone following the sport of rhetorical Israel-bashing knows, will always increase your overall score).

The source for Dickins’ denial about Iran’s nukes is an objective, and apparently quite credible, inside source – known in his day job as Grand Ayatollah Ali Hoseyni Khameni.

Yes, just to be clear, this is the same Khameni who called Israel the “enemy of G0d,” the same nation whose leaders have “proclaimed that the Holocaust never happened while vowing to complete it; the same nation who sent an ambassador to Poland who in 2006 wanted to measure the ovens at Auschwitz to prove them inadequate for genocide.” Yet, this CiF commenter and his 40 friends who recommended his post – alone among even the very worst Iran apologists today (almost all of which now concede that Tehran is of course pursuing nuclear weapons, only disagreeing on how to respond) – accepts Iran’s denial at face value.

Dickins’ comments perfectly illustrate the truth of Will’s axiom – proven over and over by the columnists (and their fellow travelers) at the Guardian who continually hold simply untenable positions – that, “believing is seeing.”