Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to apologize to our guests. I was required to be in the House because I have a motion being put forward, so I'm playing a certain amount of catch-up.
I would start off my remarks by speaking to the fact that 30 years ago I was in Saudi Arabia for six months. If you look at your dates, you'll see that it was right around the time of the revolution. In Saudi Arabia, I made the mistake on a Friday of going down past the parking lot of the Great Mosque. Under sharia law, they administer the punishments on Fridays. I didn't observe it, but I was there within five minutes of a beheading. At the time I passed by, they were removing a man's hand. It gave me a very intense sense of the fundamentalism there. Then, of course, at that same time, they took the hostages in Iran.
What I'm leading up to, and why I want to address my remarks to you, Professor Yari, is that one of the things I'm hearing today, for one of the first times from one of our witnesses, is actually about engagement. I tend to be a person who favours engagement, so I lean that way automatically.
Various witnesses, in their testimony before us, talked about the engagement of youth and how so many are under 30 years of age. I have a couple of questions. First, do these young people understand the beginning of the revolution and how the clerics virtually stole that revolution?
Speaking of sanctions, we know that under the sanctions in Iraq, 500,000 children died. So I am certainly not on that page with anybody.
My final question for you, sir, would be this. When I was in Saudi Arabia, the United States was referred to as the “Great Satan”, but Canada was not. It very clearly was not. Would the community in Iran still view us that way? In your opinion, would the work of this committee have an actual impact there?