by Michael Deacon, Telegraph
The veteran journalist’s defence of Ali Larijani, the man behind the deaths of so many protesters, is not his first Middle Eastern misstep
Sadly, I’ve never had the honour of meeting the BBC’s John Simpson, but I feel sure that he’s a very nice man. The sort of person who is capable of seeing the good in everyone.
That, at least, is all I can conclude from his extraordinary remarks about Ali Larijani, the de facto Iranian leader who was killed this week in an Israeli air strike.
“I’ve met Ali Larijani several times over the years,” revealed the BBC’s world affairs editor on social media. “Yes, he was a top figure in a nasty regime. But he always seemed clever and reasonable – the kind of person you might want to negotiate a peace deal with.”
Describing Larijani as “reasonable” is, I can’t help feeling, a touch on the generous side, even for a man as kind-hearted as Simpson. In the words of The New York Times, Larijani was “in charge of using lethal force to crush the recent protests demanding the end of Islamic rule”. This lethal force is reported to have killed as many as 40,000 protesters. Should those 40,000 victims simply have tried negotiating with dear old Ali? If only they’d known how tremendously reasonable he was.
Anyway, Simpson has since deleted his post, because, he complained, it was “being interpreted wrongly”. Stupid public. Even so, this is hardly the first time he’s made puzzling remarks about Middle Eastern murderers.