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The Weakest Western Link in the Nuclear Talks with Iran

When it comes to Iran, Germany routinely put its business interests over security and human rights. Benjamin Weinthal writes:

Since the world powers—Germany, France, the U.S., the UK, China, and Russia—reached a tentative agreement with Tehran in 2013, there has been no shortage of German politicians and businesspeople bending over backward to court Iran’s regime.

Last month, the Islamic Republic’s oil minister Bijan Zangeneh met with Germany’s economics minister, Sigmar Gabriel, to discuss investments in Iran. As vice chancellor, Gabriel is the number-two political leader after Chancellor Angela Merkel. Business representatives from Volkswagen and the engineering giants the Linde Group and Siemens also held talks with Zangeneh.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Germany, Iran sanctions, Israeli-German relations, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic