The Mullahs aren’t crazy—they’re Twelvers

www.americanthinker.com

The news is featuring yet another move in the sequence dance starring the USA and Iran—a classic Contra dance where the partners alternately dance together and then apart until the music forces them together again.

But you may say, this time it’s different, a phrase equally dangerous in foreign relations and investing. You may be right, but I won’t believe it until we have Bridge-and-Powerhouse Day, as Jesse Waters named it. Actually, I think we will need to destroy more than just one bridge or power plant, maybe many more, to convince me that it really is different this time.

That’s because we are dealing with Twelvers, and they aren’t crazy. Remember Hemingway’s apocryphal reply to Fitzgerald about the rich being different from us, because they have more money? The Twelvers are very different from us because they have their special religion. As I wrote here in April, using a pen name, the Twelvers want Apocalypse Now, and if they must nuke Jerusalem or Paris, so be it. That’s their ticket to Paradise.

It’s their religion, and who are you to question it? Just because fulfilling the Twelvers’ goal might involve eradicating the human race is no reason for you to get all het up about it, as we say here in Texas.

What’s that? You say you don’t believe they would serenely blow themselves up along with the rest of the world, that they are just bluffing? Do you think that the hijackers of 9/11 weren’t serious?

The hijackers possessed what William James called “The Will to Believe,” in a lecture delivered in 1896, published shortly thereafter and still widely available. He spoke of live and dead hypotheses, with a live hypothesis being one that appeals as a real possibility. He followed with words that I find so ironic when contrasted with today’s news:

If I asked you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive.
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The Iranian mullahs would object to being called Arabs, but their belief in their Mahdi, the Hidden Imam, is absolute, as real as the giant black rock in Mecca.

And today we see the TV talking heads and politicians with more name-calling. They are a bit more imaginative; I will give them that. Today I heard cuckoo, loco, and scum, which were new for me. Many were retreads: crazy, irrational, sick, and evil. I read that Senator Cruz likes theocratic lunatics, which is getting closer to my theme.

Fanatics is my favorite because it hits closest to the truth of what the mullahs are: Of an action or speech: Such as might result from possession by a deity or demon, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That sense of the word first appeared in the 16th century, but these days it is most often used in connection with sports or food. Just calling the mullahs fanatics is not nearly enough, and in fact, leaving that word hanging by itself is poor journalism.

They are fanatics, to be sure, but where is the modifier? Why don’t they say religious fanatics? Is there an embargo on the phrase? Is mainstream media afraid to say what is objectively true? Is this just another example of avoiding any mention of Islam and its adherents?

American Thinker isn’t afraid, and its website has yet to burst into flames. The war in Iran has been major news for over four months, and I asked Google Gemini 3 to find articles published in the world press specifically discussing the military threat of the Twelver ideology. The AI came up with fewer than ten, with a Fox News article in March being the sole example from US broadcast media. Even that article spoke mostly about the “destabilizing” influence of the ideology.

What is it we are so often told? Listen to what people are saying; they will tell you who they are. That’s a hard one when the media never tell you in the first place.

Also from the OED: Obfuscate—To cast into darkness or shadow; to cloud, obscure. Gemini just produced: The act of deliberately or unintentionally making something unclear, complex, or difficult to understand.

Which brings me back to the word so often used when describing the mullahs: fanatics. Just calling them fanatics without elaboration is a different way to obfuscate. I think it is often intentional. Pretty much along the same line as uniformly referring to the Muslim grooming and rape gangs that plagued England for years as Asians. Yes, young lady, you must cross the High Street in fear if you see a couple of Japanese men walking toward you. Preposterous. The girls of Rotherham have known the code for years.

Asians—now that is pure obfuscation.

Image created using AI.

Some of this material was extracted from The Spheres of the Universe, not yet published, a pseudo-Victorian romantic murder mystery set in the United States of 2095. Dr. Atcheson welcomes correspondence at [email protected].