Dealing with Fanatics who are Paranoid

Paranoid fanatics are a breed apart. Pure fanatics we can live with easily enough, we better, because they are everywhere. There are those who have that kind of excessive zeal about dieting or exercise or a cause (political or religious). People can reveal the same kind of stubborn insistence through obsessive thoughts that don't go away and/or compulsive behaviors like hand washing that seems endless.  

When paranoia {extreme distrustful suspiciousness) is added to the mix the compound becomes seriously combustible. Paranoid fanatics are beset by imaginary demons and because they are imaginary the threat is limitless. At least people who are diet fanatics are dealing with tangible items: food and weight both of which stand ready to be touched and measured. But you can't touch or measure the many varieties or ingredients comprising conspiracy theory.

We should pity the person who believes the US government was in on the plot to demolish the World Trade Center or that the same government introduced the HIV virus in order to devastate the African American community. Then there is that other fallacious  conviction that the "Holocaust" during WWII never took place. But pity can go just so far. What do you do with people who hold those false beliefs and are so furious about the matter that they pose the distinct threat of carrying out some kind of horrific retaliation or of provoking others to do so in their stead.  

Can we isolate people or groups or nations who pose those risks? Can we talk reasonably and nicely to them in an attempt to lessen their overwhelming sense of threat? Should we threaten, as in the case of Iran, to bomb them into oblivion were they to carry through on certain retaliatory hostile acts? What this last option offers is to substitute a threat that is tangible and real for one that is imaginary.

It is most interesting that when Hillary Clinton said that Iran would be bombed into oblivion were they to make a first nuclear strike on Israel she got an immediate response, reeking with concern, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He declared that anyone who spoke that irresponsibly shouldn't be President of the US. Maybe she's got something there . Incidentally, now that we know his advice I'm convinced that's what the super delegates have been waiting for and will now make their choices public.