ZOA slams Merkel – absurd to claim Iran is anti-Israel, not antisemitic

The Zionist Organization of America’s national president Morton A. Klein savaged German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration on Monday for failing to confront the Iranian regime’s antisemitism.

“It seems that, come what may, foreign leaders like Chancellor Merkel this past week, would rather say or do anything else other than state and condemn the obvious fact that, in this case, the Iranian regime, has been and is still seeking to eliminate the Jewish State of Israel,” Klein said.

Klein’s criticism came in response to a Jerusalem Post article stating that the Merkel’s government and her foreign ministry labeled the call to destroy Israel by commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Gen. Hussein Salami as merely “anti-Israel rhetoric” and not antisemitic.

“We live in a surreal age in which the most blatant, the most obvious, the most frightening expressions of hatred against the Jewish people and its collective existence is doggedly ignored, whitewashed or watered down by foreign governments,” Klein said. “The German government has been trying to bust the new US sanctions imposed by President Trump and is far more interested in revenues from trade with Iran than with keeping the peace or taking steps against those who threaten genocide – as Iran clearly does.”

The ZOA statement said Merkel ignores “Iranian genocidal ambitions to destroy the Jewish State of Israel.”

“Merkel and the German government more generally have avoided mentioning antisemitism in the context of statements relating to Iranian actions,” Klein added.

General Salami said that “This sinister regime [Israel] must be wiped off the map and this is no longer … a dream [but] it is an achievable goal … [Iran has] managed to obtain the capacity to destroy the impostor Zionist regime 40 years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.”

When the Post reached out to the German government for comment, a spokesman replied, “We have nothing to add to the reply of the foreign office.”

A Post query to Merkel’s spokeswoman was not immediately returned on Wednesday. Post tweet queries to Merkel’s chief spokesman, Steffen Seibert, were not answered.