“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 invitation. Like Hakakian, I am a member of CFR. And yesterday, I, along with a handful of others, attended the Raisi event.

The meeting was not on the record, so I cannot report anything said there. As a reporter whose entire purpose is to write for the public about what he learns, I have to fight the instinct to spit out the gag, which was a condition of my attendance. But even though I cannot report what was said, I can say with confidence that the audience at any gathering like that will come away knowing more, and reporting more competently, than if they had stayed home on principle. Even when the words spoken are off the record, as Raisi’s were, those who hear them will never write, think, or report about him the same way again. That will be to our readers’ benefit. And the more repressive, homicidal, and authoritarian the figure at the podium, the greater the value in hearing him speak. I doubt anyone considered the event a “baptism” or cleansing. Attendees I spoke with expressed skepticism and revulsion; none mistook this for a party in anyone’s honor.

At my first job, as a cub reporter for The Cambodia Daily, my editor sent me off to cover a speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen—not because Hun Sen was announcing something important (I could not be trusted with that), but because “he’s the fucking prime minister, and you never know what he’s going to say.” All by itself, that uncertainty made coverage compulsory—and Hun Sen was the strongman leader of a minor country, not a near-nuclear one with an assassination program and genocidal ambitions.

Raisi addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. His speech was covered heavily, and easily debunked in many of its particulars. At one point, the Israeli ambassador, Gilad Erdan, interrupted Raisi’s speech by parading around with a sign that read IRANIAN WOMEN DESERVE FREEDOM NOW. (Erdan was totally ignored by Raisi, then removed forcibly by UN staff.)

In a small group setting, such theatrics—or even just a persistent line of questioning—can actually produce interesting results. The Iranian president appears in public and even campaigns for office, in a sham election system where eligible candidates are groomed and selected by the Guardian Council, which in turn does the bidding of the Iranian supreme leader, who in turn is elected by no one, unless you count a single vote by God almighty. (Now there’s an election in need of monitoring.) Inside Iran, the opportunities for sustained, prosecutorial questioning of politicians of Raisi’s rank are few, and of course any Iranian responsible for such impertinence would put their freedom in jeopardy.

That leaves events such as CFR’s as the rare occasions to see how Iran’s leaders react to pressure, or indeed provocation. “Dialogue is reserved for those with whom we have disagreements,” Hakakian writes. But talking to coldhearted criminals, whether in public or private, can be illuminating. The great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci spent more than a week begging Raisi’s erstwhile boss, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, for an audience. He was a stern and charmless figure, used to being surrounded by obsequious religious students, and about as likely as a Pet Rock to have his mind changed by dialogue with Fallaci. Her irreverence, and his peevish but vigorous replies, remain among the great documents of Khomeini’s personality. She scoffed at Iran’s segregation of the sexes and forced veiling of women. “By the way,” she asked, “how do you swim in a chador?”

KHOMEINI: This is none of your business. Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it.

FALLACI: That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done. But tell me something. A woman such as I, who has always lived among men, showing her neck, her hair, her ears, who has been in war and slept in the front line in the field among soldiers, according to you, is she an immoral, bold and unproper woman?

KHOMEINI: Your conscience knows the answer.

Until a politician is pressed in this way—especially a politician who lives in a cocoon of sycophancy—it is impossible to know what he’s made of. Will the sight of an unveiled woman cause him to shriek in fear? End the conversation in disgust? Or will he be stolid and unmoved? In the answer is the difference between a murderous neurotic and a murderous sociopath. Puzzlingly, Khomeini reacted differently altogether, Fallaci reported. He laughed. His son Ahmad told her it was the first time he had seen his father react this way to anything.

[Read: How Oriana Fallaci's writings on Islamism are remembered—and reviled]

At the UN, Raisi’s speech was littered with crackpot geopolitical claims, such as that the Islamic State “was created by the United States.” And it contained more sinister implications. He described Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force who was killed by an American missile in Baghdad in 202020, as a “martyr in the path of the freedom of the nations of the region.” (This is what “freedom” means to Raisi: rule by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Damascus.) Soleimani, a soldier, was allegedly on a military mission that threatened the lives of U.S. personnel in Iraq. “We will follow the implementation of justice” for his killing, Raisi said to the General Assembly, “through a fair court, until a definitive result is reached.” But he also suggested that the “fair court” would be at most a formality, because the culprits—former President Donald Trump, along with members of his administration—had already admitted guilt and “printed his name on the case.”

Raisi was a judge for years before he became Iran’s president, and to me, that line sounded like a death sentence pronounced in absentia against former U.S. officials. The words were chosen with care; I doubt We will execute Donald Trump would have been met with the same bored expressions worn by the delegates present for Raisi’s rather more subtle formulation. An in-person meeting is the only venue, public or private, in which to demand that he resolve ambiguity on this subject. He could add clarity and say that Iran is a civilized, modern country, and does not go around killing people. And even if he refused to answer—well, refusing to say, on direct invitation, We are not trying to kill Donald Trump (or Salman Rushdie, or Masih Alinejad) would itself be an answer, revelatory of Raisi’s character and of the regime he leads.

One might object that all of these supposed revelations are in fact common knowledge among anyone who has observed Iran closely over the past five decades. To the Iranian dissident activists holding signs and hooting insults at Raisi near the UN yesterday—I went out and spoke with them after the CFR event—the deaths of tens of thousands of their countrymen have already revealed plenty.

But the Islamic Republic of Iran has recently attempted to soften its public image, to say through implication what in previous times, before the discovery in Tehran of the darker arts of public relations, would have been said directly. To translate, detect, and expose these innuendoes takes constant refreshment of one’s sense of the people who say them. And for that, nothing beats sitting in their presence and talking.

The activists seem to think being in Raisi’s presence might beguile people into believing what he says or even developing fuzzy feelings toward his delegation. The attendees were polite. Raisi’s haters want anyone in his presence to address him with the same venom they would. Another strategy is to maintain just enough politeness to keep the subject speaking, ideally more than he wishes he had.

As I left the meeting with Raisi, a smiling Iranian official offered me an elegant tote, “a gift of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” I declined, and may have even recoiled involuntarily when I realized that I had nearly taken a goodie bag offered on behalf of a man who runs an assassination program. When I looked back on my way to the elevator, the official looked dejected, and I saw behind him a whole table of gifts, brought all the way from Tehran, and incapable of being given away in New York.

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.