Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would also like to join in thanking the witnesses.
My first question is to Mr. Comras. Your presentation understandably focused on the danger of the nuclear threat and the comprehensive set of sanctions that could target Iranian vulnerability. You also identified the various options, but focused on the importance of the comprehensive, strategic, targeted sanctions. Your presentation made no mention of the state-sanctioned incitement to genocide in Iran, and I understand that you didn't mention this because of your focus on the nuclear.
Regrettably, we have been witnessing—and we've heard this in witness testimony before this committee—a sustained, systematic, and widespread incitement that has engaged the various sectors of leadership in Iran, particularly Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. All this is being done in violation of the prohibition against direct and public incitement to genocide in the genocide convention and international law, and where state parties to the genocide convention and the international community have an obligation to prevent it.
Should we not be factoring in the genocidal together with the nuclear, since it is the incitement that is the context in which the nuclear acts itself out? In fact, if we are only concerned with the nuclear, we ought to be as concerned--if not more--that Pakistan has nuclear weapons as we are with Iran. It seems to me that you can't really abstract the genocidal from the nuclear. If you focus solely on the nuclear, as much of the international community has been doing, you end up--however inadvertently--sanitizing the genocidal. Yet in the genocidal you hear reference to wiping Israel off the map through one bomb. So that's where you get the convergence in the statements by Iranian leadership.
So should we not be factoring in the genocidal and seeking attending sanctions on the incitement, lest, however inadvertently, we sanitize the incitement by focusing on the nuclear?