Become a Member
Opinion

Germany must stop cosying up to Iran

It should sever its relationship with a series of Iranian organisations

December 15, 2021 16:48
Imam-Ali-Moschee Hamburg
1 min read

Last Tuesday, the US government placed sanctions on the prison in the central Iranian
city of Isfahan for human rights violations. This is the same Iranian metropolis that has a twin-city partnership with the German city of Freiburg.

The US Treasury Department said authorities in Isfahan executed Mostafa Salehi in 2020 “after taking part in street protests in December 2017 and January 2018,” and that his execution was a “flagrant denial of the right to life and liberty of Salehi for seeking to
exercise his right to freedom of expression and his right of peaceful assembly.”

Isfahan’s execution sprees over the years have done nothing to faze either Freiburg’s Mayor Martin Horn, Winfried Kretschmann, the Green party governor of Baden-Württemberg (the state where Freiburg is located), and the civil servant tasked with fighting antisemitism in the state, Michael Blume.

The clerical regime in Isfahan holds an annual al-Quds Day event calling for the elimination
of the Jewish state. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, antisemitism has proliferated in Isfahan, resulting in the exodus of most of its Jews, the brutal murder in 2012 of a 57-year-old Jewish woman and the apparently deliberate neglect of a historic Jewish school.