Germany has an Iran problem. The European economic powerhouse and U.S. ally has played a key role in boosting the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
But for the first time in 16 years, Germany has a new chancellor. Olaf Scholz, a member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, helms a coalition government that is composed of the Social Democratic, Green, and Free Democratic parties.
Scholz has a chance to improve on his predecessor’s appeasement of Iran.
As the journalist Benjamin Weinthal documented, Berlin has been “cozying up to Iran.” Germany also has close economic and trading ties with the regime. Indeed, as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) has highlighted, Germany helped to industrialize Iran long before the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. According to one analysis, Germany was “by far” Iran’s largest trading partner in Europe, with a trade volume that was, on average, $1.14 billion higher than Tehran’s average trade volume with the European Union. A United States-led sanctions regime, which reached its height during the Trump years, led to a decline in Iran’s trade relations with Europe and other countries. But Germany seemed largely undeterred.
Berlin’s relations with Iran have continued despite the Islamic Republic’s support for terrorism.
German companies even sent weapons-grade chemicals to Iran despite EU sanctions, according to a 2019 report. The chemicals, which could be used to make sarin gas, eventually found their way to Syria, a client state of Iran. Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has used sarin gas on his own people, suffocating thousands, including children, during the country’s civil war.
There’s more.
Germany has allowed Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy and U.S.-designated terrorist group in Lebanon, to “raise funds and recruit new members” on German soil. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel spent years refusing U.S. demands to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, trotting out the fiction that the group had separate “political’ and “military” wings — a claim that terror analysts called “frankly laughable” in sworn testimony before the Congress. Germany, however, indulged the idea until 2020, when it belatedly listed Hezbollah.
Germany’s reluctance to take Iran and its proxies to task is noteworthy.
In 1992, regime assassins murdered four Iranian dissidents at West Berlin’s Mykonos restaurant. Iran’s Berlin Embassy, a subsequent four-year trial revealed, was a “headquarters for a government intelligence gathering operation largely focused on the activities of the exiled [Iranian] opposition.” The two assassins were sentenced to prison, and Iranian Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian and 14 members of his staff were expelled.
Incredibly, Mousavian is now a professor at Princeton University, where he has celebrated the regime’s death threats against U.S. officials.
There are good reasons for Germany to take these terrorists more seriously. In addition to training terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force is responsible for many of the improvised explosive device attacks that murdered and maimed U.S. and NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of course, Iran has also called for the destruction of Israel. Tehran finances terrorist groups that attack the Jewish state and is seeking nuclear weapons to initiate another genocide. In 2008, Merkel said Germany “has a special historical responsibility for Israel’s security.”
She didn’t always live up to her words. But her successor must.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
