Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations invited me to a roundtable discussion it will be hosting Tuesday with the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who will be in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. As a longtime member of the council, I wrote back to decline the invitation and published a brief statement about why I believe that Raisi, a man who ought to be behind bars for mass murder, must not be accorded this legitimacy.

Last year, a court in Sweden found a prison official guilty of war crimes in one of the worst atrocities ever committed in the history of modern Iran. That verdict directly implicated Raisi, who was a central enforcer of the policy of exterminating prisoners of conscience, which resulted in thousands of executions carried out over about five months starting in July 1988. This judicial finding mirrored the result of an earlier prosecution in Germany, where a court ruled that Iran’s top leaders were responsible for the state-sponsored assassination of four regime opponents in Berlin in 1992.

I spent four years researching a book about that case, which set this vital precedent: In response to the judgment, all but one member of the European Union withdrew its ambassador from Tehran (as did Canada). The diplomatic blackout delivered a grave blow to the regime, forcing Iran to end its efforts to eliminate dissidents and opponents in the West for more than a decade. After that, none of Iran’s leaders whom the presiding judge said had “ordered the crime,” including the late President Hashemi Rafsanjani, ever set foot again in the EU.

[Roya Hakakian: To war criminals who believe they have impunity, think again]

In an email to me, the CFR’s president, Michael Froman, wrote that “over the decades, CFR has hosted numerous leaders representing governments with policies many members and most American citizens objected to,” but that “a dialogue of this kind is consistent with CFR’s longstanding tradition and mission” and does not “represent an endorsement or approval of a government or its policies.” He also pointed out that “other Iranian leaders who have spoken at CFR include the shah of Iran in 1949 and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.” Although Ahmadinejad’s invitation was controversial at the time because of his record of Holocaust denial, I have no argument with Froman on that invitation. As reprehensible as Ahmadinejad’s views are, no court has fingered him as a mass murderer. There is an important distinction between Ahmadinejad, who denies an evil, and Raisi, who has committed one.  

That is a distinction that I believe the Council on Foreign Relations should make. Even though it is not a government, the council relies on American democratic values and the rule of law in delivering its mission of promoting dialogue. If one Iranian president, Rafsanjani, was declared an international persona non grata by Western allies for his part in state killings in the German precedent, then another Iranian president, Raisi, should be accorded the same treatment by virtue of the Swedish case.

In 1988, the then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa that ordered the killing of thousands of prisoners of conscience. The job of carrying out that fatwa fell to four regime officials who made up what is now commonly known as the “death committee.” Raisi, Iran’s deputy chief prosecutor at the time, was one of them. Within a few weeks, an efficient killing machine was set up at several major prisons throughout the country. Prisoners were interrogated about their religious views: whether they believed in God, Islam, the Prophet Muhammad; whether they prayed; and so on.

Although the majority of the prisoners had already stood trial and received custodial sentences, their fate now depended on how they responded to the questions. One negative answer to any of the questions sent them to the gallows. The dead, estimated to number at least 2,800 and perhaps as many as 5,000, were covertly buried in mass graves. Some families went to the prisons expecting to pick up their loved one whose sentence was up; instead, they were handed a bag containing their loved one’s few belongings. All families were denied the right to hold a funeral, lest the grieving crowd turn angry and riotous.  

[Graeme Wood: Who’s afraid of Masih Alinejad?]

The executions caused a permanent rupture between Khomeini and the cleric he had named as his successor, Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri. When Montazeri received the news of the fatwa, he wrote two scathing letters to Khomeini, describing the act as “malicious” and “vengeful.” A third letter was addressed to the members of the death committee, including Raisi, calling their work “mass murder.” When he met with them, he told them, in a chilling recording that has since become public, that they would “go down in history as criminals.”

Montazeri’s dissent ultimately cost him the succession, which went to a far more hard-line cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who still holds the post. Great evils have a way of changing the course of a nation’s history. The 1988 massacre did that for Iran.

In 2019, the Swedish authorities, through the exercise of the law of universal jurisdiction, arrested a former Iranian prison guard named Hamid Nouri, who had worked for the death committee. Some of the witnesses of that bloody summer were finally able to testify at Nouri’s lengthy trial and feel that a modicum of justice had, at last, been served. At its conclusion, in July 2022, the court found Nouri guilty of participating in the mass killings. For his part, 35 years later, Raisi boasts of his role in them, declaring the atrocity “praiseworthy” and necessary for “the nation’s security.”

When Western nations have joined together to deliver a firm message to Tehran, the clerics, however recalcitrant, have backed down. Just such a powerful show of unity came at the conclusion of a comparable trial, in April 1997, in Germany. Several Iranian and Lebanese members of the Hezbollah militia were accused of carrying out the assassination of three Iranian-Kurdish leaders along with another Iranian opposition figure at a Berlin restaurant. In their verdict, the judges found Iran’s senior leadership—including the supreme leader, the president, and the foreign minister—responsible for the crime. Earlier in the trial, the court had issued an arrest warrant for the intelligence minister, Ali Fallahian, who has since been on Interpol’s wanted list. I later interviewed the German attorney general, Alexander von Stahl, who had overseen the case. He had not, he said, been “willing to let his homeland become the playpen of thugs.”

[Mary Louise Kelly: Why I went to Iran]

If democracy is to survive the current wave of authoritarianism, Western nations must band together to uphold the rule of law. Sweden showed the way last year. Once, America led the establishment of modern democracy as we know it; today, it needs to show that sustaining democracy depends on a collective defense of its laws and judicial decisions. That means exercising an equal commitment to upholding dialogue with our adversaries and ending dialogue with those who are recognized as outlaws. So I do not believe that the Council on Foreign Relations, in this context, can stand to one side and claim that its invitation does not confer endorsement or approval: It does confer legitimacy, by treating this criminal as a reasonable interlocutor.

As the philosopher Karl Popper warned: “If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” To invite Raisi to one of our most prestigious venues, to let him sit among us, and to listen courteously to what he has to say would be to let him think he has gotten away with murder. And he would be right.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is staff writer Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy, housing, and other related topics. She recently wrote about how Montana performed a housing miracle, and why you have to care about these 12 elite colleges.

Annie just moved to New York and already has tickets to both a Fleetwood Mac dance night and a Mozart performance. When she’s not out seeing shows, you might find her walking the streets and listening to Metallica—the ideal working-mom soundtrack.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Cover story: “I never called her momma.” What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate “The only productivity hack that works on me”

The Culture Survey: Annie Lowrey

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I just moved to New York with my family; gosh, is there a better city for music? Among the many things I have tickets to and am pumped to go see: this small experimental-music festival, this Fleetwood Mac–heavy dance night, this performance of Mozart’s Requiem. (Fun fact: Mozart died prematurely while he was writing his Requiem. The guy functionally wrote his own funeral mass! That’s got to be the most metal musical act of all time. It is also the music playing when Jeffrey “The Big” Lebowski gives his “strong men also cry” monologue, by the way.) [Related: The secret to Mozart’s lasting appeal]

An actor I would watch in anything: Helen Mirren.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Jurassic Park for the blockbuster. I must have seen it a hundred times by now; I can recite pretty much the entire thing. I’d argue that it’s not just a great movie; it’s a perfect movie: perfectly structured and perfectly paced, with perfectly formed characters whose arcs wrap up perfectly, in several cases because the character gets eaten by a dinosaur, as they fully deserve. As for the art film, I’m going with Into Great Silence, a documentary about monks living in an isolated monastery in the French Alps. [Related: The high tension and pure camp of Jurassic Park]   

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I am terrible at picking favorites! I love everything. I pick good stuff to read! As for novels, I adored Hamnet. I adored Convenience Store Woman. I adored The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. I loved Matrix. I loved All This Could Be Different. In terms of nonfiction, I’m mostly reading books that have to do with the book I am writing, which is about administrative complexity, bureaucracy, administrative harassment, and paperwork. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Slavery by Another Name—there are so many astonishing books that touch on the subject. I just read a great book about Pakistan called Government of Paper.

An author I will read anything by: Namwali Serpell.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: For a quiet song, I really like the Max Richter recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. For a loud song, I love “Creeping Death,” by Metallica. I often listen to it while walking around the city. Working moms deserve soundtracks that capture their desire to pour gasoline in a public trash can and light it on fire, you know?

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Nam June Paik at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. What a showstopper. What a sense of humor! I wanted to live in that exhibit for the rest of my life.

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: My older son is full of malapropisms. For a long time, he’d sing, “You are my shinecone, my only shinecone” instead of “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” And he insisted that there was a bird called a “peagle,” a combination of a peacock and an eagle. A good bird! I had a little oil painting made and framed.

The last arts/culture/entertainment thing that made me cry: I feel lucky to be a person who cries easily; it is a wonderful, cathartic thing to do. I sobbed while watching the “Sleepytime” episode of Bluey for the 78th time. I cry every time. Holst! What a majestic composer. [Related: In praise of Bluey, the most grown-up television show for children]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I read tons of poetry. It’s so great for when you’re tired, stressed out, short on time. You read a poem; it takes three minutes or 20 minutes; you get drop-kicked out of the galaxy and torn apart and rebuilt and returned home anew. I think about this Aracelis Girmay poem all the time. I mumble, “I translate the Bible into velociraptor” often. I love this Sophie Robinson poem. Is it possible not to tear up reading the last line of this Nicole Sealey stunner? Or not laugh at the last line of this David Berman poem?

I have also been reading and rereading and rereading poetry about or that includes administrative and bureaucratic language: Tracy K. Smith’s “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It.” Claire Schwartz’s Civil Service. Solmaz Sharif’s Customs.

The Week Ahead

Wellness, a new novel by Nathan Hill (the author of The Nix), features a couple trying to repair their marriage as the idealism of their youth fades (on sale Tuesday). The 12th season of American Horror Story features Emma Roberts, Kim Kardashian, and Cara Delevingne (premieres Wednesday on FX). In Spy Kids: Armageddon, a game developer unleashes a computer virus that threatens the world (streaming on Netflix this Friday).

Essay

Illustration by Katie Martin

Why Are Women Freezing Their Eggs? Look to the Men.

By Anna Louie Sussman

The struggling American man is one of the few objects of bipartisan concern. Both conservatives and liberals bemoan men’s underrepresentation in higher education, their greater likelihood to die a “death of despair,” and the growing share of them who are not working or looking for work. But the chorus of concern rarely touches on how male decline shapes the lives of the people most likely to date or marry them—that is to say, women.

In Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, Marcia C. Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale, tells this side of the story. Beginning in 2014, she conducted interviews with 150 American women who had frozen their eggs—most of them heterosexual women who wanted a partner they could have and raise children with. She concluded that, contrary to the commonly held notion that most professional women were freezing their eggs so they could lean into their jobs, “Egg freezing was not about their careers. It was about being single or in very unstable relationships with men who were unwilling to commit to them.”

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Don’t let love take over your life. The problems that marriage can’t fix Political art isn’t always better art. The Morning Show has a star problem. Lauren Groff has written a new gospel. The man who became Uncle Tom The secret to appreciating Garfield From feminist to right-wing conspiracist America has a private-beach problem. Ada Limón: “The Origin Revisited” Poem: “Rainbow Queen Encyclopedia” Editor’s note: A warning from another time

Catch Up on The Atlantic

America just hit the lithium jackpot. The truth about Hunter Biden’s indictment America gave up on the best home technology there is.

Photo Album

Surfing dogs compete in Helen Woodward Animal Center’s 18th Annual Surf Dog Surf-A-Thon, in Del Mar, California. (Daniel Knighton / Getty)

A new volcanic eruption in Hawaii, an end-of-summer cattle drive in Germany, and more, in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters.

At every turn, the NFL portrays itself as being deeply committed to racial progress. It has a $250 million social-justice fund. It created and then expanded a rule designed to give candidates of color a shot at leadership roles. The league even had “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn often described as the Black national anthem, performed alongside “The Star-Spangled Banner” during kickoff weekend. But a contrasting picture of how the league really views matters of racial justice keeps coming into clearer focus.

Earlier this week, the former NFL Network reporter Jim Trotter, who is Black, sued the league, accusing it of retaliation. The journalist alleges that the network, which is owned by the NFL, didn’t renew his contract because he publicly challenged Roger Goodell about the league’s poor diversity record during the commissioner’s Super Bowl press conference the past two years.

Trotter’s lengthy filing describes a league that, behind the scenes, regularly shrugs off calls for greater racial equity. Trotter alleges that when he asked Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones at the 2021 Pro Football Hall of Fame exhibition game between the Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers why the NFL didn’t have more Black people in positions of power, Jones responded, “If Blacks feel some kind of way, they should buy their own team and hire who they want to hire.” In his legal filing, Trotter said his superiors told him not to report Jones’s comments.

[Jemele Hill: The NFL is suddenly worried about Black lives]

Trotter’s lawsuit also asserts that, during a September 2020 Zoom call that involved several NFL Media newsroom employees, one participant cited remarks that the Buffalo Bills’ owner, Terry Pegula, had made in a previous conversation about some NFL players’ social-justice activism and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. According to Trotter’s account, this colleague heard Pegula say, “If the Black players don’t like it here, they should go back to Africa and see how bad it is.”

Trotter does not name the colleague, nor does he claim to have heard the alleged comment by the Bills owner firsthand. Jones and Pegula have both emphatically denied making the statements attributed to them. Pegula called Trotter’s accusations “absolutely false.” In a statement, Jones said: “Diversity and inclusion are extremely important to me personally and to the NFL. The representation made by Jim Trotter … is simply not accurate.”

In an appearance Wednesday on ESPN’s popular debate show First Take, Goodell minimized Trotter’s accusations.

“They’re allegations,” Goodell said. “Our job is to make sure that they’re factual. These are not new charges. They’re actually a couple of years old. They’ve been looked into. You’ve heard the strong denials. There’s litigation ongoing now.” The commissioner also reaffirmed the league’s commitment to diversity. “We know the importance of progress in diversity and we’re working very hard at it,” he said. “Is progress where we want it to be? No, it’s always slower than you want it to be, but I’m confident we’re moving in the right direction.”

Trotter is one of the most respected reporters covering professional football. If the NFL’s expectation was that Trotter wouldn’t hold the league accountable for its record, then it clearly wasn’t aware of Trotter’s reputation in the media industry. I have known him personally for years and consider him trustworthy. But Trotter’s word is not the only bit of evidence before us. Leaked emails, legal findings, and statistical analyses all point toward the conclusion that, for all the league’s public spin, powerful figures throughout the NFL ignore the contributions and concerns of Black players and coaches when the cameras and microphones are off.

In 2021, the Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden resigned after emails surfaced in which he made racist, homophobic, and misogynistic statements. In 2022, the former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three teams, claiming that the league was “rife with racism.” Earlier this year, a federal judge allowed his lawsuit to proceed. Flores, now the defensive coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings, alleged that the NFL had frozen Black candidates out of key positions such as head coach, offensive and defensive coordinator, quarterbacks coach, and general manager.

That NFL teams have struggled to hire and retain Black coaches is no secret; the league’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview diverse candidates for major coaching and front-office positions, has yielded little progress in the face of owners’ unwillingness to hire nonwhite head coaches and general managers. When Flores filed his lawsuit, there was only one Black head coach among the NFL’s 32 teams—an embarrassing statistic for a league in which a majority of the players are Black. This season, the NFL has a total of six coaches of color, just three of whom are Black. Trotter himself pointed out last year that nearly half of the league’s teams had never had a Black non-interim head coach. That list includes Jerry Jones’s team, the Cowboys.

[Jemele Hill: What the Jerry Jones photo reveals about the NFL]

NFL owners’ reluctance to put Black men in decision-making roles extends to their choices about which players to draft. Earlier this week, the news website SFGATE reported that Black quarterbacks are being systematically underrated in the NFL draft; those who are chosen measurably outperform white peers who were picked in the same round. What this means in practice is simple: Teams are missing out on wins because they underestimate how well Black quarterbacks can play.

That report is in line with an ugly historical trend: teams’ refusal to consider Black players as quarterbacks out of the racist belief that they lacked the intelligence and leadership ability to perform in the position. In 1923, Fritz Pollard became the first Black man to play quarterback in American professional football. Ten years later, George Preston Marshall, the owner of Washington, D.C.’s football team, instigated a ban on all Black players that lasted through 1945. It took another 23 years for Marlin Briscoe to become the first Black quarterback to start for an NFL team in the modern Super Bowl era.

You would think that in a league as competitive as the NFL, owners and coaches would have an earnest desire to find the best possible play callers, regardless of their race. The private comments allegedly being made by some of the NFL’s most powerful people would help explain why the league seems intent, when any race-related controversy arises, on doing the barest minimum necessary to make the bad publicity go away.

In 2018, a number of owners, players, and league executives met for several hours at the NFL headquarters in New York to discuss how to handle social-justice protests during the national anthem. The New York Times obtained audio from that conversation. During the meeting, Terry Pegula suggested that the NFL needed a Black spokesperson to highlight how the players and owners were working together. As a precedent, he approvingly cited the actor Charlton Heston’s role for many years as “a figurehead” for the National Rifle Association. “For us to have a face, as an African American, at least a face that could be in the media,” Pegula said in the meeting, “we could fall in behind that.”

Pegula’s suggestion that a Black spokesperson could provide cover for a mostly white group of owners who did not want to deal with the backlash to the protests was cringeworthy. It also was sadly unsurprising. Considerable evidence shows that the NFL isn’t truly committed to addressing the issues that Trotter presented in his lawsuit. The league would instead rather cultivate an inclusive public image that doesn’t jibe with what’s really happening in secret.