-By Warner Todd Huston
CNN’s Piers Morgan has now met and interviewed Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and has found himself “fascinated” with the man. He isn’t just fascinated with Ahmadinejad, the man famous for his wish to kill all Jews and for being a proponent of killing gays, Morgan also finds him “charming.”
Morgan claims to have “pressed” Ahmadinejad on several issues — such as gays in Iran and the existence of Israel. But if his preview of the interview is any indication, Morgan swallowed a lot of nonsense whole and without argument, too.
Morgan was quite taken with the Iranian president telling CNN’s Brooke Baldwin that Ahmadinejad is “contradictory.” Of course, most people would just say that Ahmadinejad is a liar. But not Morgan.
“He’s contradictory in this sense, Brooke. When I asked him… How would you feel, given your relentless anti-Israeli statements, how would he feel if he was to find out that one of his children was dating a Jew. And to my astonishment he said he would be perfectly OK with that. And I was surprised. It wasn’t what I was expecting.”
Come on, Piers. You can’t possibly believe that Ahmadinejad was being truthful there, can you?
Morgan went on,
“He’s a surprising character. He’s unpredictable. I don’t think that he’s mad in the way many in the west perhaps prefer to see him. He’s certainly a caricature figure when he comes to America. I didn’t get a sense of a crazy mad man. I get a sense of somebody playing very hard to his home audience where he’s not that popular these days, he’s in his final year as president.”
This is an example of the left’s desire to assign insanity to anyone that is simply evil. Evil is not necessarily “mad,” Piers. It can be downright utilitarian and ruthlessly logical at times.
But the worst part of Morgan’s preview was when he seemed to swallow whole the absurd “clarification” from Ahmadinejad about what he “really meant” when he said that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth.
“… he clarified the statement he made which caused a huge fury at the time which was that he wanted to wipe Israel off the map. When I really pressed him on this tonight he says, really what he implies what he meant was he wanted to wipe the, as he put it, Israeli occupation of Palestinian land off the map. So, he’s clarified that and reigned back slightly that ‘I want to get rid of Israel,’ to ‘I want to get rid of’ what he sees as Israeli occupation. Quite an interesting clarification.”
Morgan is obviously completely uninformed about what an “Israeli occupied” area means to a radical Islamist. You see, Mr. Morgan, everywhere Jews are is “occupied” as far as an Islamist is concerned. So, no, Mr. Morgan, there was no “clarification” of his position. He said he wanted Israel wiped off the face of the earth and he reiterated that stance in different language with you, Piers. You just weren’t sharp enough to understand that.
Morgan wrapped up the preview giving Brooke Baldwin a summation of his assessment of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s character.
“He is, at times, charming and sinister and contradictory and unpredictable,” Morgan said enthusiastically, “and occasionally he says stuff where you find yourself nodding in agreement.”
Maybe so. Especially when you don’t even understand what he is saying.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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