Tributes aren’t enough -- European leaders commemorate Shoah but do little to combat modern genocide threats

by Benjamin Weinthal
Dr. Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, an Iranian-German Baha’i, has systematically documented the genocidal acts targeting his community. But German members of parliament have been eerily silent about Iran’s repression of the Baha’i, sexual minorities, women and trade unions, as well as Iranian Holocaust denial, and the country’s notable lack of free speech. Just last October, German parliamentary representatives from the Green Party, Left Party, Social Democrats, Christian Social Union and Christian Democratic Union met with Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, the head of Iran’s parliamentary cultural committee, who famously supported the fatwa calling for the murder of British novelist Salman Rushdie. German lawmakers also met with Mohammad-Javad Larijani, head of the Iranian human-rights council, who denied the Holocaust during a Mideast security conference sponsored by the German Foreign Ministry close to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial in 2008 in the heart of Berlin’s government district.
Though Christian Social Union delegation head Peter Gauweiler and his fellow parliamentary colleagues, Monika Grütters of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, Luc Jochimsen from the Left Party, Claudia Roth from the Green Party, and the Social Democrats’ Günter Gloser have frequently participated in Holocaust remembrance events in the German Bundestag and across the country, they chose not to criticize the behaviors of their hosts in Iran. According to its statistics, the Auschwitz museum saw a record number of visitors in 2010. While Europeans continue to educate their children about the Holocaust, and the memorial devoted to the six million murdered European Jews attracts growing attendance in Berlin, European political leaders continually fail to call genocide by its name and confront the Iranian regime over its grotesque Holocaust denial. Sadly, there remains a massive disconnect between the steady stream of Holocaust remembrance events in Europe and the diplomatic and political realities. In perhaps the most emasculating episode in recent diplomatic history, openly gay German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle told the tabloid Bunte last year that he did not take his partner with him to Saudi Arabia or other Islamic countries, because “we want to encourage the idea of tolerance around the world, but we don’t want to achieve the opposite either by acting imprudently.” Not one lifetime after the Holocaust, can the German foreign minister truly find no fault with those who claim cultural differences allow them to engage in lethal homophobia and persecution of minority groups? Commemorating the evils of the Holocaust is easy. Expunging genocidal acts and plans today takes courage and concrete action, but is all the more necessary.
More...
ynet