“If they met, I don’t know what they said. I hope they were reinforcing America’s foreign policy, not their own,” Mike Pompeo reacted.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFU.S. Senator Chris Murphy listens as Majory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg speaks via Skype to Democratic Senators at a forum on gun violence at the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, DC, U.S., March 7, 2018.(photo credit: REUTERS)
Senator Chris Murphy on Tuesday defended a meeting he held on Saturday with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, Associated Press(AP) reported.Murphy said that the meeting was important because it is “dangerous not to talk to one’s enemies.”“I have no delusions about Iran — they are our adversary, responsible for the killing of thousands of Americans and unacceptable levels of support for terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East,” he wrote in a Medium post.Murphy added that he “cannot conduct diplomacy on behalf of the whole of the US government, and I don’t pretend to be in a position to do so. But if Trump isn’t going to talk to Iran, then someone should.”The meeting follows Trump administration's efforts to increasingly isolate Iran through re-imposing sanctions under its “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran, AP explained.Speaking to reporters, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Zarif was sanctioned by the United States, Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reported.“He’s the foreign minister for a country that shot down an airliner and has yet to turn over the black boxes,” said Pompeo, in reference to Iran’s shooting down of a Ukrainian commercial airliner in January, JNS explained.“This is the foreign minister of a country that killed an American on December 27. This is the foreign minister of a country that is the world’s largest state sponsor of terror and the world’s largest sponsor of antisemitism,” Pompeo added.“If they met, I don’t know what they said. I hope they were reinforcing America’s foreign policy, not their own,” Pompeo also said.
