Suppose you suddenly became very wealthy,
and you decided to start a philanthropic organization. You want to hire someone
to run it for you, and you want to be sure you'll get the right person.
To that end, you design a questionnaire
made of ten questions. Seven of them are of the kind you'll find in any
questionnaire. The other three are meant to tell you what thoughts go on inside
the head of the applicant; thoughts that he or she may not even be aware they
entertain. Here are the three questions:
1. A
retirement home says it cares for two dozen patients, and needs $24,000 to buy
a number of new items on the market that will make the lives of the inmates
more comfortable. But you discover that the home has 25 patients and not 24.
Will you give it the $24,000 it asked for? Or will you raise the amount to
$25,000? Or what will you do?
2. Your
relationship with a municipality in which the headquarter of your business was
located before you became very wealthy, and whose administration you had
extensive dealings with, soured some time ago, and you moved your business to
another municipality. But the city hall that you left behind, and vowed will
never accept anything from you, is now asking for a donation. What will you
do?
3. A
country where you were sent to spend the Summer holidays a few times as a kid
and a young adult, was not exactly a liberal democracy. Despite the many
efforts to persuade it to open the autocratic system by which it was ruled, it
remained closed for many decades. But it is beginning to open up now, and has
not asked us for anything. How will you deal with its government and its
people?
A number of candidates applied for the job
and answered the questionnaire. Most of the answers were of the ordinary,
run-of-the-mill kind and predictable, except for one candidate. His answers
drew your attention for being weird and very much those of an outlier.
Responding to the first question, the
candidate said he would give the retirement home nothing––not one dollar; not
even one red cent.
To the second question, he said he would
give the municipality nothing. Not only that; he would go further and contact
all the other charitable organizations, whether they are near or far, and tell
them they must stop helping that municipality.
To the third question, he said he would
take advantage of the country opening up, and contact the folks down there ––
not the government to encourage it to open up even more, but –– contact the rebels
who were suppressed. He would pay them to terrorize the country and work on
starting a full-blown revolution.
While the candidate is sitting in the
guest room waiting for you to come and interview him, you call an ambulance and
instruct the medics to drive this man to the nearest mental hospital.
Well my friend, while a scenario like that
is unlikely to unfold in real life, you wish there was a way by which you could
lock up the warmongering mental cases who want to treat the nations of the
world, as bad or worse than the way the crazy candidate of the story wanted to
treat others.
One such character is Jed Babbin who
wrote: “The International Monetary Fund should not bail out Iran,” an article
that also came under the subtitle: “IMF should not make a loan to the maligned
country even for COVID-19 crisis.” It was published on April 18, 2020 in The
Washington Times. Here is what Babbin said that corresponds to the sayings of
the candidate in the story:
“Iran asked the IMF for an emergency loan
to help it fight the coronavirus pandemic. The COVID-19 disaster in Iran, as
the national Council of Resistance of Iran report indicates, is worse than the
ayatollahs' regime admits. When Trump offered medical assistance, Khamenei
rejected it. A letter to Ayatollah Khamenei from 100 Iranian academics and
political and social activists published on an Iranian website accused Mr.
Khamenei of being the number one culprit in the pandemic becoming an Iranian
national disaster. A published statement by a female outgoing member of the
Iranian parliament accused the regime of concealing the seriousness of the
outbreak, of failing to take actions such as quarantine to slow the spread of
the virus. We should be covertly aiding Iran's potential revolutionaries to
overthrow the government”.
This is how Jed Babbin and those like him
want America to interact with the part of the world that is not in its camp.
You'll encounter this kind of characters only in America, and find that they
are despised even by America's close friends and allies.
To the warmongers, humanity is made of two
camps, which are permanently at war with each other, even if it’s not a
shooting war. They believe that a final Armageddon will take place in which
their camp will vanquish the other. It will score a decisive victory, thus
extend its dominion over the entire planet.