Talk to Coldhearted Criminals

“Never touch your idols,” Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary, “for the gilding will stick to your fingers.” A few days ago, Roya Hakakian argued in The Atlantic that meeting your enemies is even less hygienic. Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, “Has Blood on His Hands,” the headline announced. Raisi had been asked to address the Council on Foreign Relations, and Hakakian wrote in a statement that the invitation was “a political baptism” for a depraved man. Previous Iranian presidents have included a Holocaust denier, but Raisi’s depravity crossed a line: Courts had determined that he ran a policy of mass killings of dissidents in the 1980s. “There is an important distinction between [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, who denies an evil,” she wrote, “and Raisi, who has committed one.”

[Roya Hakakian: Ebrahim Raisi has blood on his hands]

I see things differently: The more odious the geopolitical figure, the more urgent the