Finally, there was Ali Larijani, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, playing the role of the indignant revolutionary deigning to address the benighted emissaries of a dying order. “What is important,” he sternly instructed, “is that the world undergoes fundamental changes.”
Cunningly, he appealed for multicultural tolerance: “In the West you have adopted secularism as the basis of democracy. Our democracy is based on Islamic thoughts.” Assuming the mantle of victim, he complained that “in the West, the defamation of the Prophet of Islam is being supported.”
As for Iran’s nuclear program, he insisted it is intended only to generate electricity. “We have no intention of aggression against any country,'' he said, sounding offended by the very thought. He added that, on the contrary, “We are a victim of terrorism.” At whose hands, he did not specify.
Larijani sternly set down the rules for those wishing to question him: He was not to be asked about “suspension of uranium enrichment, the Holocaust or Israel.”
Perhaps the sharpest rejoinder came from Sen. Lindsey Graham. “It must have been difficult for you to say what you said,” he told the Iranian official. “Because it was difficult for me to listen.”
Graham observed: “No one who denies the Holocaust can be trusted with nuclear materials.” And he advised Larijani to “Go visit Dachau,” the Nazi concentration camp preserved as a memorial in Munich’s bucolic suburbs; an unintended consequence of the policy of appeasement.
In contrast with Graham and other members of the American delegation – which included also Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl -- few European leaders seemed distressed by Larijani. If anything, they congratulated themselves for having invited him to Munich to begin a process of “peace though dialogue.”
As for what Larijani and his fellow Islamist revolutionaries think of their European hosts, one can only surmise. But I suspect it is not too far from the Führer’s appraisal of those he humiliated in Munich nearly 70 years ago.