Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Congratulations, Professor, on your appointment.
I would like to echo what Mr. Silva just said. I was listening to the testimony from both of you, and things such as the daily incitement of hatred in all kinds of mass media, the desecration of graves, the ransacking of property and sometimes confiscation of it, and the arrests, all sound eerily like the events leading up to pogrom of the Jewish community prior to the Second World War. So like Mr. Silva, I have some grave concerns in that regard.
I want to zero in on one point that my colleague Mr. Hiebert had talked about, but I just want to get a little more detail.
Is the sole reason the persecution is so pernicious towards the Bahá'í religious minority because they're excluded, or is there some other element of independence that terrifies the ayatollahs?