Germany's infatuation with Iran
You will recall that I reported last week on the rude surprise that awaited members of Israel's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee at the Bundestag in Berlin; the presence of member's of the Iranian Majilis. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Benny Weinthal reports that the encounter has strained Israeli-German relations. So is Germany so infatuated with Iran? Benny explains. Polenz’s defense on Friday of the Majlis members’ visit should also be accompanied by a healthy dose of skepticism.I guess the Iranians are the most likely party to forgive the Germans for perpetrating the Holocaust. Guilt wears off quickly, doesn't it? Disgusting....
Last October, Bundestag deputy Peter Gauweiler, from the CDU’s Bavarian sister party CSU and chairman of the legislature’s Subcommittee on Foreign Cultural and Educational Policies, led a group of German lawmakers who met with Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s parliament, in Iran. That’s the same Larijani who at the 2009 Munich security conference caused an uproar when he said his country has “different perspectives on the Holocaust.”
The group of German legislators, including deputies from the Greens, Social Democrats, CDU and the Left Party, also met during the October 2010 trip to the Islamic Republic with Ali Larijani’s brother Mohammad Javad Larijani, who heads the human rights council in the Iranian judiciary.
Mohammad Larijani in 2008 – during a German Foreign Ministry-sponsored event close to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial – denied the Holocaust and called for Israel’s destruction. The Bundestag members last year chose not to publicly criticize the Holocaust denial and the genocidal statements of the Larijani brothers. A month after the Gauweiler delegation visited Iran, Elke Hoff, a lawmaker from Foreign Minister Westerwelle’s Free Democratic Party, met “senior Iranian officials” during a trip to the Islamic Republic.
Hoff subsequently refused to answer press queries at the time about her trip to Iran. She is a member of the Bundestag’s Defense Committee and its Subcommittee on Disarmament, Arms Control and Non- Proliferation. She is also member of the German-Iranian parliamentary group and serves on the board of the German Near and Middle East Association, a pro-Iranian business trade organization. The association’s honorary chairman is former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who met President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran to promote German- Iranian trade in 2009.
What perhaps made the recent diplomatic row over Germany hosting Iran’s Majlis into a crisis for the Israeli-German “special relationship” was that MKs, particularly Mofaz, directly experienced a strange fusion of the Bundestag with members of the Majlis. Mofaz, who left Iran at age nine for Israel, is known for a hawkish posture toward Iran’s anti-Israel policies and its nuclear weapons program.
The long-standing relations between the Majlis and the Bundestag have been reported on, largely in the Israeli and the US press, but first-hand experience last week seems to have brought the depth and the intensity of German-Iranian relations to the fore for Israel’s lawmakers.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Bundestag, Iranian Majilis, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Shaul Mofaz
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:42 AM
3 Comments:
The more things change...
What's the "special relationship" between Germany and Israel compared to the fraternal bond between Aryans?
That says it all.
What could go wrong indeed
Britain too is infatuated with that loathsome regime! Yesterday the British government and the BMA, British Medical Association, the union for doctors, called on the Bahraini government to free some doctors who had treated the protesters. They never called on the Iranian regime not to torture and kill the doctors and nurses who tended the wounded among the students and Green protesters in June 2009( and continuing up to today)
No call on the Syrians to stop murdering their own people!!
The pattern is clear and the instruction comes from Obama and his regime! This government and the politicised unions are totally disgusting and perverted, to be, in effect, mouthpieces for the Iranian islamic dictatorship!
The Europeans are different from your every day zonot in one crucial respect--zonot who ply the streets will cheerfully admit that "it's about the money". The business moguls and bureaucratic hoity toity of the European ruling class will always claim it's about something else, anything else, international justice, honor, or whatever. True, sometimes it's also about craven fear.
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