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.

The Iranian-American journalist Karmel Melamed reported recently that authorities in Isfahan refused to even investigate Toobah Nehdaran’s 2012 murder. Disturbingly, Blume has showed no appetite to confront the city partnership that helps to mainstream Iran’s theocratic regime — the world’s worst state-sponsor of terrorism, antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

Blume has engaged in much unsavoury conduct over the years. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has said, regarding Blume’s activities on social media, that the “job of an antisemitism commissioner is to fight it and not spread it." 

In June, Blume’s counterpart in Hamburg, antisemitism officer Stefan Hensel, urged the city authorities to close down the Iranian regime-controlled Islamic Center of Hamburg. In January 2020, supporters of the Islamic Republic used the centre to mourn the death of the US- and EU-designated terrorist Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force.

Germany’s new Green party-Social Democratic coalition government opposes the closure of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s base in Hamburg. Germany’s new Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, then mayor of Hamburg, signed a facilities contract with the Islamic Center and other Islamic groups in 2012. 

If Germany is serious about its oft-stated declaration that there is “no place for antisemitism” in the Federal Republic, the political establishments in Freiburg and Hamburg must immediately pull the plug on their relationships with the virulently antisemitic Iranian regime.

Benjamin Weinthal is a fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies