From The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, March 23, 2010, by ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ:
Neville Chamberlain was remembered for appeasing Germany, not his progressive social programs.
The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy.
There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small "sacrifice" of the billion Muslims in the world.
The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime.
Finally, Iran could use its nuclear weapons without ever detonating a bomb. By constantly threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation, it could engender so much fear among Israelis as to incite mass immigration, a brain drain, or a significant decline in people moving to Israel.
These are the specific ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons, primarily against the Jewish state. But there are other ways in which a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger the world. First, it would cause an arms race in which every nation in the Middle East would seek to obtain nuclear weapons.
Second, it would almost certainly provoke Israel into engaging in either a pre-emptive or retaliatory attack, thus inflaming the entire region or inciting further attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas.
Third, it would provide Iran with a nuclear umbrella under which it could accelerate its efforts at regional hegemony. Had Iraq operated under a nuclear umbrella when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein's forces would still be in Kuwait.
Fourth, it would embolden the most radical elements in the Middle East to continue their war of words and deeds against the United States and its allies.
And finally, it would inevitably unleash the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, nobody knows the extent of the harm a nuclear-armed Iran could produce.
In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.
In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"
But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"
Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain's financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain's enduring legacy.
So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.
If Iran were to become a nuclear power, there would be plenty of blame to go around. A National Intelligence Report, issued on President George W. Bush's watch, distorted the truth by suggestion that Iran had ended its quest for nuclear weapons. It also withheld the fact that U.S. intelligence had discovered a nuclear facility near Qum, Iran, that could be used only for the production of nuclear weapons.
Chamberlain, too, was not entirely to blame for Hitler's initial triumphs. He became prime minister after his predecessors allowed Germany to rearm. Nevertheless, it is Chamberlain who has come to symbolize the failure to prevent Hitler's ascendancy.
So too will Mr. Obama come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Siemens sanctions Iranian business
From The Financial Times, January 26 2010, by Daniel Schaefer in Munich, Gerrit Wiesmann in Berlin and Daniel Dombey in Washington:
Siemens ...announced on Tuesday it would seek no new business in Iran.
The move comes as a US and European push for new United Nations sanctions on Tehran continues to encounter obstacles. It also highlights the importance of Washington’s informal but intense drive to convince international groups to drop ties with Iran.
US administration officials say that if organisations do business with Iran they risk trading with groups proscribed by Washington, such as the Revolutionary Guard.
Siemens came under additional pressure within the US after reports last year that technology sold to Iran by its joint venture Nokia Siemens Networks could be used to monitor calls within the country. The sale led campaign groups to call for a boycott of Siemens.
Peter Loescher, Siemens chief executive, revealed at the company’s annual shareholder meeting that the board had decided in October to refrain from new business with Tehran.
...Mr Loescher’s announcement came as German chancellor Angela Merkel warned that “time is running out” for Iran, which has ignored repeated international deadlines to stop enriching uranium. She was speaking after hosting Shimon Peres, president of Israel, who has criticised Germany for allowing its companies to continue to trade with Iran.
The US and its European partners are yet to convince China and Russia to sign up to more UN sanctions, amid particular resistance from Beijing, which has replaced Germany as Iran’s top trading partner.
While Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank pulled out of Iran after earlier UN resolutions and the US’s accompanying lobbying campaign, German manufacturers have continued to do business there.
Daimler pulled out of Iran in 2007 – when it still owned US carmaker Chrysler and was under direct pressure from Washington – but no other big-name groups have since publicly followed suit...
Siemens ...announced on Tuesday it would seek no new business in Iran.
The move comes as a US and European push for new United Nations sanctions on Tehran continues to encounter obstacles. It also highlights the importance of Washington’s informal but intense drive to convince international groups to drop ties with Iran.
US administration officials say that if organisations do business with Iran they risk trading with groups proscribed by Washington, such as the Revolutionary Guard.
Siemens came under additional pressure within the US after reports last year that technology sold to Iran by its joint venture Nokia Siemens Networks could be used to monitor calls within the country. The sale led campaign groups to call for a boycott of Siemens.
Peter Loescher, Siemens chief executive, revealed at the company’s annual shareholder meeting that the board had decided in October to refrain from new business with Tehran.
...Mr Loescher’s announcement came as German chancellor Angela Merkel warned that “time is running out” for Iran, which has ignored repeated international deadlines to stop enriching uranium. She was speaking after hosting Shimon Peres, president of Israel, who has criticised Germany for allowing its companies to continue to trade with Iran.
The US and its European partners are yet to convince China and Russia to sign up to more UN sanctions, amid particular resistance from Beijing, which has replaced Germany as Iran’s top trading partner.
While Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank pulled out of Iran after earlier UN resolutions and the US’s accompanying lobbying campaign, German manufacturers have continued to do business there.
Daimler pulled out of Iran in 2007 – when it still owned US carmaker Chrysler and was under direct pressure from Washington – but no other big-name groups have since publicly followed suit...
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Berlin more sympathetic to Shoah memory than Jerusalem
From The Jerusalem Post, 22 Dec 2009, by Efraim Zuroff, director of Simon Wiesenthal Center [also see this previous posting of Monday, August 24, 2009 entitled Honouring the SS in Estonia]:
...during the past two years, [the new (Eastern European) members of the European Union] and especially the Baltics, have spearheaded ...[a] campaign to achieve official recognition for the canard that communist crimes were just as bad as those of the Nazis...[to minimize the role of local collaborators in Nazi crimes and instead focus attention on the atrocities perpetrated by communists, and especially the Jews among them ...designed to silence Jewish criticism of the role played by Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Croatians, etc. in the Holocaust, provide a justification for past and current local anti-Semitism and to switch the public's perception of the population of these countries from perpetrators of the most heinous crime to its victims.]
And if there is a country which especially deserves to be criticized harshly in this regard it is Lithuania, whose government is actively helping to finance this campaign, and where its anti-Semitic implications have reached a despicable low during the past three years.
Thus after making a mockery of the efforts to bring unprosecuted Lithuanian Nazi war criminals to justice by insuring that even those two local Security Police commanders and one operative who were prosecuted would not sit even one day in jail for their crimes, Lithuanian prosecutors launched investigations against several Jewish Soviet anti-Nazi partisans, among them Dr. Yitzhak Arad, former chairman of Yad Vashem, on bogus charges of war crimes against Lithuanians. Accompanied by hysterically anti-Semitic articles in the nationalist press, the campaign turned the victims of the Holocaust into perpetrators and the villains who assisted the Nazis in the mass murder of Jews into patriotic heroes, a distortion of the historical events much more palatable to the Lithuanian public.
If [Lithuanian Foreign Minister Vygaudas] Usackas had been invited to Jerusalem to formally announce that his government
In fact, even Usackas himself, in a speech delivered a week prior to the forum, spoke of Lithuanian Righteous Among the Nations and Nazi collaborators as if they were equivalent phenomenon, despite the fact that the latter outnumbered the former many times over.
At the forum, the foreign minister repeated this lie, asking "how could it be that while some Lithuanians were risking their lives to save their Jewish neighbors, others were committing crimes by sending them to death?" a sanitized version of the Lithuanian reality during the Shoah in which many Lithuanians actively participated in the mass murder of Jews (and not like elsewhere in Europe, where local collaborators "merely" sent them to their deaths in Poland) and very few tried to assist them.
And while he did specify that the condemnation of Stalinism "should never be applied to diminish the moral and political lessons of the Holocaust," he did not say a word about halting the nefarious campaign his government is actively supporting to equate communism and Nazism or its practical implications as formulated in the Prague Declaration of June 2008, which calls for a joint commemoration day for the victims of the Nazis and the communists (which would make one specifically for the Shoah superfluous) and a joint research institute for totalitarian crimes (which would make institutions like Yad Vashem redundant).
To add insult to injury, after devoting most of his comments to the importance of fighting against anti-Semitism, I was told that the minister and his entire entourage left the forum immediately after his speech never to return, leaving his hosts without any justification for their unfortunate decision to give Usackas a very respectable platform to once again, in typical fashion, distort the history of the Holocaust and escape the harsh criticism that Lithuanian actions deserve.
Needless to say, there were no such problems at the Berlin [World Congress of Russian Jewry conference entitled "The Legacy of World War II and the Holocaust"], which was united in its condemnation of Holocaust distortion, especially in the Baltics and Ukraine, and which undertook to actively combat these dangerous phenomenon.
In that respect, as hard as this is to believe, this past Hanukka, Berlin was a much more sympathetic venue to discuss the threat to the accuracy of the historical record of World War II and to Holocaust memory than was Jerusalem.
...during the past two years, [the new (Eastern European) members of the European Union] and especially the Baltics, have spearheaded ...[a] campaign to achieve official recognition for the canard that communist crimes were just as bad as those of the Nazis...[to minimize the role of local collaborators in Nazi crimes and instead focus attention on the atrocities perpetrated by communists, and especially the Jews among them ...designed to silence Jewish criticism of the role played by Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Croatians, etc. in the Holocaust, provide a justification for past and current local anti-Semitism and to switch the public's perception of the population of these countries from perpetrators of the most heinous crime to its victims.]
And if there is a country which especially deserves to be criticized harshly in this regard it is Lithuania, whose government is actively helping to finance this campaign, and where its anti-Semitic implications have reached a despicable low during the past three years.
Thus after making a mockery of the efforts to bring unprosecuted Lithuanian Nazi war criminals to justice by insuring that even those two local Security Police commanders and one operative who were prosecuted would not sit even one day in jail for their crimes, Lithuanian prosecutors launched investigations against several Jewish Soviet anti-Nazi partisans, among them Dr. Yitzhak Arad, former chairman of Yad Vashem, on bogus charges of war crimes against Lithuanians. Accompanied by hysterically anti-Semitic articles in the nationalist press, the campaign turned the victims of the Holocaust into perpetrators and the villains who assisted the Nazis in the mass murder of Jews into patriotic heroes, a distortion of the historical events much more palatable to the Lithuanian public.
If [Lithuanian Foreign Minister Vygaudas] Usackas had been invited to Jerusalem to formally announce that his government
- was immediately stopping its communism equals Nazism campaign,
- would henceforth commit itself to teaching the painful truth about the extensive role of Lithuanian collaborators in the mass murder of Jews in Lithuania and elsewhere in Europe,
- would officially close all the cases against former Jewish partisans and officially apologize to them,
his invitation to the Global Forum [to Combat Anti-Semitism - in Jerusalem, last month] would certainly have been justified. But that was not the case.
IF ANYTHING, the opposite is true. On December 2, for example, Lithuanian Justice Minister Remigijus Simasius made a public statement defending Lithuania's abysmal record of extensive collaboration with the Nazis during World War II and absolving his countrymen of any blame for their role in Holocaust crimes. And instead of acknowledging Lithuanian complicity, he preferred to attack the US for its restrictive immigration policies during that period.In fact, even Usackas himself, in a speech delivered a week prior to the forum, spoke of Lithuanian Righteous Among the Nations and Nazi collaborators as if they were equivalent phenomenon, despite the fact that the latter outnumbered the former many times over.
At the forum, the foreign minister repeated this lie, asking "how could it be that while some Lithuanians were risking their lives to save their Jewish neighbors, others were committing crimes by sending them to death?" a sanitized version of the Lithuanian reality during the Shoah in which many Lithuanians actively participated in the mass murder of Jews (and not like elsewhere in Europe, where local collaborators "merely" sent them to their deaths in Poland) and very few tried to assist them.
And while he did specify that the condemnation of Stalinism "should never be applied to diminish the moral and political lessons of the Holocaust," he did not say a word about halting the nefarious campaign his government is actively supporting to equate communism and Nazism or its practical implications as formulated in the Prague Declaration of June 2008, which calls for a joint commemoration day for the victims of the Nazis and the communists (which would make one specifically for the Shoah superfluous) and a joint research institute for totalitarian crimes (which would make institutions like Yad Vashem redundant).
To add insult to injury, after devoting most of his comments to the importance of fighting against anti-Semitism, I was told that the minister and his entire entourage left the forum immediately after his speech never to return, leaving his hosts without any justification for their unfortunate decision to give Usackas a very respectable platform to once again, in typical fashion, distort the history of the Holocaust and escape the harsh criticism that Lithuanian actions deserve.
Needless to say, there were no such problems at the Berlin [World Congress of Russian Jewry conference entitled "The Legacy of World War II and the Holocaust"], which was united in its condemnation of Holocaust distortion, especially in the Baltics and Ukraine, and which undertook to actively combat these dangerous phenomenon.
In that respect, as hard as this is to believe, this past Hanukka, Berlin was a much more sympathetic venue to discuss the threat to the accuracy of the historical record of World War II and to Holocaust memory than was Jerusalem.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Israel beefs up its submarine platform for nuclear warheads
From SpaceWars (UPI), Sep 30, 2009:
Israel has taken delivery of two German-made submarines capable of launching missiles with nuclear warheads.
...Called U212s, the submarines were upgraded in Germany by Israeli technicians and engineers in order to enable them to carry nuclear warheads. Initially in 2006, when the sale was confirmed, the German government said the two vessels were not equipped to carry nuclear weapons.
The submarines were ordered in 2005, and delivery was originally scheduled for 2010.
With the latest delivery, Israel now holds five state-of-the-art U212s, designed for a crew of 35 and capable of launching cruise missiles that carry nuclear warheads to a distance of 2,810 miles.
....The first two U212s were donated by Berlin to the government of Israel after the 1991 Gulf War. It split the cost of the third with the Jewish state, offering it at an almost symbolic price, local media reported.
....Israeli media have said that the fleet of five vessels could be key in any decision by Israel to launch an attack on Iranian targets from the sea.
An Israeli submarine recently used the Suez Canal for the first time, anchoring in the Red Sea in a journey that would have normally required the Israeli vessel to travel around the coast of Africa.
Escorted in June by Egyptian navy vessels, the move was intended to send a message to Iran.
The delivery of the submarines follows Tehran's missile tests earlier this week...
Israel has taken delivery of two German-made submarines capable of launching missiles with nuclear warheads.
...Called U212s, the submarines were upgraded in Germany by Israeli technicians and engineers in order to enable them to carry nuclear warheads. Initially in 2006, when the sale was confirmed, the German government said the two vessels were not equipped to carry nuclear weapons.
The submarines were ordered in 2005, and delivery was originally scheduled for 2010.
With the latest delivery, Israel now holds five state-of-the-art U212s, designed for a crew of 35 and capable of launching cruise missiles that carry nuclear warheads to a distance of 2,810 miles.
....The first two U212s were donated by Berlin to the government of Israel after the 1991 Gulf War. It split the cost of the third with the Jewish state, offering it at an almost symbolic price, local media reported.
....Israeli media have said that the fleet of five vessels could be key in any decision by Israel to launch an attack on Iranian targets from the sea.
An Israeli submarine recently used the Suez Canal for the first time, anchoring in the Red Sea in a journey that would have normally required the Israeli vessel to travel around the coast of Africa.
Escorted in June by Egyptian navy vessels, the move was intended to send a message to Iran.
The delivery of the submarines follows Tehran's missile tests earlier this week...
Friday, December 12, 2008
Toben's offensive
From: The Australian December 08, 2008 by Pia Akerman:
...serial Holocaust revisionist Fredrick Toben is unrepentant....the Holocaust denier is free once more to loudly declare the views that others find so offensive.
"The Germans never systematically exterminated anyone - it's a lie," he says.... "I refuse to recant."
..Toben, 64, returned to Adelaide last week after his 50-day stay in London's Wandsworth Prison and wasted no time in resuming his Adelaide Institute newsletter...
The former schoolteacher was arrested aboard a plane at Heathrow airport on October 1 en route to Dubai. British police were acting on a European Union arrest warrant, issued in Germany, which accused him of publishing internet material "of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature".
...But Dr Toben's legal team - recruited by former Newcastle beauty queen and outspoken revisionist supporter Michele Renouf - emerged victorious after a British judge ruled the arrest warrant invalid.
...Holocaust denial is not a crime in Britain or Australia.
It was not the first time Germany - his homeland - had pursued Dr Toben. He spent seven months in a Mannheim prison in 1999 for inciting racism.
With international travel off the cards in the near future in case of further arrest, Dr Toben remains in Adelaide awaiting a Federal Court judgment in a civil case against him.
He has pleaded not guilty to 28 charges alleging he breached orders by the Federal Court in 2002 not to publish offensive material on his website. He faces a finding of criminal contempt if found guilty.
...serial Holocaust revisionist Fredrick Toben is unrepentant....the Holocaust denier is free once more to loudly declare the views that others find so offensive.
"The Germans never systematically exterminated anyone - it's a lie," he says.... "I refuse to recant."
..Toben, 64, returned to Adelaide last week after his 50-day stay in London's Wandsworth Prison and wasted no time in resuming his Adelaide Institute newsletter...
The former schoolteacher was arrested aboard a plane at Heathrow airport on October 1 en route to Dubai. British police were acting on a European Union arrest warrant, issued in Germany, which accused him of publishing internet material "of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature".
...But Dr Toben's legal team - recruited by former Newcastle beauty queen and outspoken revisionist supporter Michele Renouf - emerged victorious after a British judge ruled the arrest warrant invalid.
...Holocaust denial is not a crime in Britain or Australia.
It was not the first time Germany - his homeland - had pursued Dr Toben. He spent seven months in a Mannheim prison in 1999 for inciting racism.
With international travel off the cards in the near future in case of further arrest, Dr Toben remains in Adelaide awaiting a Federal Court judgment in a civil case against him.
He has pleaded not guilty to 28 charges alleging he breached orders by the Federal Court in 2002 not to publish offensive material on his website. He faces a finding of criminal contempt if found guilty.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Architectural plans of Auschwitz death camp found in Berlin
(photo from Der BILD)
From THE JERUSALEM POST, Nov. 8, 2008:
The German newspaper Bild published never-before-seen architectural plans of the Auschwitz extermination camp on Saturday that reveal, in their unequivocally marked sections, that everyone involved in the operation of Auschwitz knew full well that it was intended for the systematic extermination of human beings, the paper said.
(Follow this link to the original BILD article in German, or this one to a Google translation to English.)
The floor plans, cross-sections and maps on yellowing paper, mostly on a scale of 1:100, were reportedly found during the evacuation of an abandoned Berlin apartment. They were drawn up between 1941 and 1943.
The 28 documents include detailed blueprints of prisoner barracks, gas chambers marked clearly Gaskammer (Gas chamber) in a gothic-inspired font and a cross-section of the gate into which the rails of trains entered carrying Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled persons and other people the National Socialists sent to die.
One of the maps carries the handwritten signature of Gestapo commander Heinrich Himmler.
The plans were not construction plans but were drawn after Auschwitz-Birkenau was built (on the foundations of an old military base from the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
On January 20, 1942, Nazi officials met in the resort of Wannsee east of Berlin where they devised the Final Solution, and this has traditionally been taken by historians as the beginning of the Nazis' extermination campaign.
One of the drawings, predating the Wannsee Conference by eight months, sheds new light on the chronology of the German genocide machine.
Dr. Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, chief director of the Bundesarchivs, the federal archives in Berlin, said the find was of "extraordinary importance."
"The plans are authentic certificates of a systematically planned genocide of European Jews," Bild quoted Kreikamp as saying.
As the plans show a "Laundry and shower room" leading into a "Dressing room" and then to the "Gas chamber," there could be no doubt of the purpose of the large room marked Gaskammer.
The documents rebut the last of those who would deny the Holocaust, Bild said in its report.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Germany blocks effective sanctions of Iran
From the Jerusalem Post Oct. 15, 2008, by Benjamin Weinthal, correspondent in BERLIN:
German Ambassador to Iran Herbert Honsowitz violated EU guidelines by allowing a military attaché to attend an anti-Israel military parade in Teheran late last month, according to a spokeswoman for the German Foreign Ministry's Iran section.
"Israel must be wiped off the map" was one of the slogans painted on Shihab-3 missiles featured at the event in Teheran, which commemorated the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War.
The presence of a German defense attaché at the military parade was a source of enormous embarrassment for the ministry in Berlin. In uncharacteristically strong language and disciplinary action, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier ordered Honsowitz to return to Berlin on September 29.
...A ministry spokeswoman, who wished to remain unnamed, told the Post that the European Union reached a consensus three years ago not to attend the annual military parade, adding that "well-know anti-Israeli and anti-American slogans" were displayed at the event.
..."Unacceptable and strange behavior" is how the spokeswoman described the attaché's presence at the parade...
...Honsowitz, who has served as ambassador in Teheran since 2006 and is considered "Iran-friendly," has now left Berlin to return to his post.
...In April, the Post reported on Honsowitz's presence at an Iranian oil show and the embassy's role in facilitating an expansion of German engineering firms' business with the Iranian regime. Honsowitz told Iranian Press TV last November that the "German Embassy is trying to take measures toward maintaining and improving economic ties between the private sectors of the two countries."
Israeli officials view Germany as severely undercutting France and Britain's effort to economically isolate Iran because of its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. According to German and Iranian-exile critics, Steinmeier has shown great leniency toward the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic policies of the Islamic Republic.
... Social Democratic Party head Steinmeier ...and his Social Democrats, a partner in the coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel, refuse to enact legislation banning trade with Iran.
Many Israeli government officials view an end to German-Iranian economic relations as the litmus test on combating Iranian anti-Semitism and ensuring Israel's security.
Nasrin Amirsedghi, an intellectual who fled the Islamic Republic and lives in Germany, told the Post "the main responsibility for the future lies in the hands of Europe, and particularly with the German government. Back then [in 1945] Germany and the Jews were finally liberated from Hitler's barbaric tyranny with the help of the Allies. Today, it is Germany's duty to take this threat [Iran] seriously and take action. Anyone who does not recognize this danger should not be surprised when Iranian atom bombs are flying everywhere."
German Ambassador to Iran Herbert Honsowitz violated EU guidelines by allowing a military attaché to attend an anti-Israel military parade in Teheran late last month, according to a spokeswoman for the German Foreign Ministry's Iran section.
"Israel must be wiped off the map" was one of the slogans painted on Shihab-3 missiles featured at the event in Teheran, which commemorated the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War.
The presence of a German defense attaché at the military parade was a source of enormous embarrassment for the ministry in Berlin. In uncharacteristically strong language and disciplinary action, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier ordered Honsowitz to return to Berlin on September 29.
...A ministry spokeswoman, who wished to remain unnamed, told the Post that the European Union reached a consensus three years ago not to attend the annual military parade, adding that "well-know anti-Israeli and anti-American slogans" were displayed at the event.
..."Unacceptable and strange behavior" is how the spokeswoman described the attaché's presence at the parade...
...Honsowitz, who has served as ambassador in Teheran since 2006 and is considered "Iran-friendly," has now left Berlin to return to his post.
...In April, the Post reported on Honsowitz's presence at an Iranian oil show and the embassy's role in facilitating an expansion of German engineering firms' business with the Iranian regime. Honsowitz told Iranian Press TV last November that the "German Embassy is trying to take measures toward maintaining and improving economic ties between the private sectors of the two countries."
Israeli officials view Germany as severely undercutting France and Britain's effort to economically isolate Iran because of its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. According to German and Iranian-exile critics, Steinmeier has shown great leniency toward the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic policies of the Islamic Republic.
... Social Democratic Party head Steinmeier ...and his Social Democrats, a partner in the coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel, refuse to enact legislation banning trade with Iran.
Many Israeli government officials view an end to German-Iranian economic relations as the litmus test on combating Iranian anti-Semitism and ensuring Israel's security.
Nasrin Amirsedghi, an intellectual who fled the Islamic Republic and lives in Germany, told the Post "the main responsibility for the future lies in the hands of Europe, and particularly with the German government. Back then [in 1945] Germany and the Jews were finally liberated from Hitler's barbaric tyranny with the help of the Allies. Today, it is Germany's duty to take this threat [Iran] seriously and take action. Anyone who does not recognize this danger should not be surprised when Iranian atom bombs are flying everywhere."
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Germany concerned by plans to urge aliyah among its Russian Jews
From Haaretz, 03/09/2007, by Anshel Pfeffer:
Berlin is deeply concerned over plans to expand the operations of Nativ, the Israeli government agency responsible for promoting aliyah among Jews in the former Soviet Union, to the Russian-speaking Jewish community in Germany.
...According to German figures, 206,000 Jews immigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union between 1991 and 2006, most of who remained in Germany....
...All German governments since the end of World War Two have publicly supported the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany, although for some 40 years after the war only tens of thousands of Jews remained in Germany. Berlin politicians therefore view the arrival of Jews from the former Soviet Union as a one-time opportunity to breathe new life into the German Jewish community....
..... "We are constantly trying to give the Russian Jews the feeling that they are wanted here, not as guests but as permanent residents .... These are the only immigrants we want," said a German official. "They allow us to realize our dream of rehabilitating the glorious local Jewish community." ....
Berlin is deeply concerned over plans to expand the operations of Nativ, the Israeli government agency responsible for promoting aliyah among Jews in the former Soviet Union, to the Russian-speaking Jewish community in Germany.
...According to German figures, 206,000 Jews immigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union between 1991 and 2006, most of who remained in Germany....
...All German governments since the end of World War Two have publicly supported the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany, although for some 40 years after the war only tens of thousands of Jews remained in Germany. Berlin politicians therefore view the arrival of Jews from the former Soviet Union as a one-time opportunity to breathe new life into the German Jewish community....
..... "We are constantly trying to give the Russian Jews the feeling that they are wanted here, not as guests but as permanent residents .... These are the only immigrants we want," said a German official. "They allow us to realize our dream of rehabilitating the glorious local Jewish community." ....
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