by Benjamin Weinthal, GATESTONE INSTITUTE • October 28, 2020
- Swiss and German economic deals might be aiding Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program…. The Swiss firm Ceresola TLS reached an agreement [in 2010] with the Rahab Engineering Establishment in Iran to deliver tunneling technology as part of a subway project. This is precisely the type of heavy earth-moving equipment Iran’s rulers need to burrow away nuclear facilities underground, as the regime did with the Qom and Natanz nuclear enrichment plants.
- The German company Krempel delivered to two Iranian companies insulating pressboards that were incorporated into Iranian missiles armed with chemical warheads, which were used by the Syrian regime in a chlorine gas attack in January 2018. The attack resulted in 21 injuries, including six children.
- The Association of Iranian Banks in Europe wrote in July: “45 percent of the EU exports to Iran came from Germany, which delivered goods worth 555 million Euro, with an increase of 31 percent compared to last year.”
- Europe’s most powerful economic engine, Germany, and the rest of the EU have sadly opted to align themselves with the Islamic Republic of Iran on the pressing issues of Iran’s nuclear program, and its stomach-turning human rights record.
The German company Krempel delivered to two Iranian companies insulating pressboards that were incorporated into Iranian missiles armed with chemical warheads, which were used by the Syrian regime in a chlorine gas attack in January 2018. The attack resulted in 21 injuries, including six children. Pictured: A Syrian girl holds an oxygen mask over the face of an infant at a makeshift hospital following a chlorine gas attack on the town of Douma, near Damascus on January 22, 2018. (Photo by Hasan Mohamed/AFP via Getty Images)
To better understand Europe’s current policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is worth citing an episode recounted in a 2006 essay by Iran expert Amir Taheri.
In 1984, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, then foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany and an ex-member of the Nazi party, traveled to Iran in an attempt to moderate the malign conduct of the then five-year-old revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Genscher declared his intention to engage in “critical dialogue” with the regime, but the notion sparked the joke that “critical dialogue” was really “an exercise in joint criticism, by the mullahs and the Europeans, of the Americans,” Taheri wrote. The German foreign minister announced at the time that his dialogue with Iran’s rulers was a success in “intensifying” political relations between then West Germany and the Islamic Republic.
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