When trouble erupted at the hardline Red Mosque in Islamabad in 2007, the Saudi ambassador was drafted in to broker peace.
Aiming suspicion at a hardline Islamist, the minister said the same gun had been used in Thursday's killing as in the Belaid attack.
Last week, the justice minister, Tzipi Livni, and the internal security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, both argued that rightwing extremists should be classified as terrorists following attacks on soldiers at the hardline West Bank settlement of Yitzhar.
Direct criticism had been levelled at the hardline leadership of Mr Erich Honecker and others, who had failed to recognise the relevance for East Germany of the reform process in the Soviet Union.
As my colleague Thomas Erdbrink reports from Tehran, on Tuesday Mr. Zarif used Facebook to lash out at the hardline newspaper Kayhan for printing what he called private comments about engagement with the United States and distorting their meaning by taking them out of context.
At home, hardline Tory Eurosceptic MPs, who number between 20 and 50, would vote Out in the referendum even if Mr Cameron miraculously won a deal giving Britain £10bn a year from the EU forever instead of us paying in that amount.
He eventually admitted that his language had been imprecise and he was really pointing the finger of guilt at the hardline "Zionist" policies of successive Israeli governments.
More importantly, the enemies are drug dealers and robbers, and the setting is Miami aesthetically at least, Hardline is separated from the war on terror shooters that have predominated for the past decade.
That was viewed as, at best, a hardline return to old obstinacy and, at worst, a threat to end the ceasefire after nearly two years.
