German foreign minister attracts deep criticism with pro-Iran stance
The contempt for the policies of German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who ostensibly favors the Iranian regime’s lethal antisemitism and nuclear weapons ambitions targeting Israel, is deepening by the day, according to a wide range of prominent political and civil rights critics.
The associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday:
“With all due respect, it is time for the German foreign minister to drop his assertion that it was the lessons of Auschwitz that propelled him into public life. He clearly has not applied any of the lessons to the current situation. Instead of weakening the tyrannical, genocidal regime in Tehran, he is doing everything to strengthen Iran. His instructions to the German UN ambassador are not those of a friend of a Jewish state.”
Maas, a Social Democratic Party member, announced last year that he went into politics “because of Auschwitz.”
“Before he [Maas] invokes Auschwitz again, he should go back and reread history,” Cooper said. “We expected much more from Foreign Minister Maas. Unfortunately, we find him on the wrong side of the tracks on the existential threats that Israel are facing every day.”
In a scorching opinion article in the New Journal of Zürich (NZZ) on Tuesday, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) MP Frank Müller-Rosentritt took Maas to task for Germany’s disastrous foreign policy.
“Heiko Maas, who, according to his own statements, once went into politics because of Auschwitz, chases one questionable blunder after the next in Middle East policies,” wrote Müller-Rosentritt.
Müller-Rosentritt cited examples of Maas’s alleged errors during his 18-month tenure, including permitting his undersecretary of state, Niels Annen, to celebrate Iran’s revolution at the Iranian Embassy in Berlin.
On Maas’s watch, Müller-Rosentritt wrote, Christian Clages, “The German representative in Ramallah, marked anti-Israeli and antisemitic content as ‘liked’ on social networks.”
Müller-Rosentritt said Maas allows Germany’s ambassador to the UN, Christoph Heusgen, to “attack Israel and compare Israel with Hamas.”
The FDP lawmaker wrote that “A change in the German voting behavior in the regular unilateral wave of condemnations of Israel within the UN is still not foreseeable.”
Müller-Rosentritt wrote: “The terrorist and criminal activities of Hezbollah, whether in Lebanon or in Europe, are studiously ignored by the foreign office. To classify the terrorist organization as such – as Canada, the Netherlands or the United Kingdom did – does not even seem worthy of discussion for the German government.”
The prominent German-Jewish historian Dr. Michael Wolffsohn slammed Maas’s “duplicitous” activities in a Bild commentary on Tuesday.
“Cynical or at least duplicitous is the solidarity with Jews, in view of the German devotion to Iran,” Wolffsohn wrote. “Its leadership proclaims year in, year out, to want to wipe out the ‘Zionist structure,’ thus Israel, from the map. The German appeasement of Iran is personified by the last three foreign ministers: [Frank-Walter] Steinmeier, [Sigmar] Gabriel [and] Maas. Is that solidarity with Jews?”
A spokesperson for Maas told the Post: “Foreign Minister Maas has repeatedly made clear his attitude on the Holocaust and the fight against antisemitism. He attaches the highest importance to a sincere and relentless confrontation with history and the fight against antisemitism.”