If Iran wishes and expects to be treated as a member of the international community in full standing, and requires its neighbours and adversaries to take into account its legitimate security concerns (as this newspaper has argued they should), then it cannot behave in the way it did this week, by hosting a grotesque carnival of Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, anti-Semites, Jewish millenarians, assorted lumpen-academics and rednecks.

It is simply contemptible to attempt to cast doubt on the most consciously wicked crime against humanity and one of the greatest affronts to civilisation. Does the Iranian leadership think it can in any way advance its interests - much less Iran's national interest - by consorting with neo-Nazis and former leaders of the Ku Klux Klan?