The Berlin-Rome-Tehran Axis

by Benjamin Weinthal
It is always a good sign when the Iranian regime and European countries get rankled over articles examining the ways in which European trade is propping up Iran’s rulers and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. It is one of those dirty secrets that broad swaths of the European media and politicians avoid like the plague.
One such article is my Sunday Jerusalem Post dispatch, in which I reported on Germany’s encouraging trade with Iran. Emmanuel Nahshon, the deputy chief of mission for the Israeli Embassy in Germany, told me that two seminars jointly sponsored by the German Economic Ministry and the city of Bayreuth’s chamber of commerce to promote German-Iranian trade “give Iran a feeling of support for its policies, including its ruthless and brutal repression of human rights” in the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s state-controlled newspaper Kayhan News — the main propaganda organ of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — got bent out of shape and reacted on Monday with its standard Pavlovian response about the “Zionist newspaper” Jerusalem Post and “Israel’s fright over German-Iranian trade relations.”
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