I doubt many would have been caught off-guardby the death of Muhammad Ali.Uniquely famous and in obvious decline for so long, our thoughts and responses were well rehearsed. Who didn’t know what they thought about Muhammad Ali?

I was prepared for some level of ignorance from non fight-fans and a fair amount of shallow hagiography from those to whom Ali was but a poster with a quote to hang next to Marilyn Monroe or Bruce Lee. And I found it. But it took Mehdi Hasan to be the first to openly spin nonsense in service of an agenda.

In a segment for Al Jazeera’s Reality Check,calledLet’s Not Whitewash Muhammad Ali’s Legacy, Hasandid what made him famous and fired outillogicality just rapidly enough so that a solitaryexposure allows you tomiss howunsoundly he stitched his thesis together. Watching it a second time forces you to check the reality that Mehdi…