The best-selling tabloid newspaper in Germany, BILD, has criticized last week’s visit to Iran by Claudia Roth, Vice President of the German Parliament, who, it wrote, ‘’ met with a Holocaust denier shortly before Holocaust Remembrance Day.’’
Claudia Roth, a member of the German Greens, led a delegation to Tehran that also included Dagmar Wöhrl from the CSU and Stefan Rebmann from the SPD. The five-day trip included meetings with the President of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, who denied the Holocaust at the 2009 Munich Security Conference.
Larijani defended the then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime, saying it had “different perspectives on the Holocaust.”
The German MPs also met with Masoumeh Ebtekar, the Vice President of the Islamic Republic, who was a spokeswoman for the radicals who stormed the US Embassy and took hostages in 1979. She threatened to shoot American hostages during the Islamic Revolution.
‘’Why do you meet a Jew hater, Mrs Roth," asked BILD newspaper. ‘’ The world commemorates the liberation of the survivors of the Auschwitz extermination camp - and the Bundestag Vice President is photographed with Iran's controversial politicians,’’ the paper stressed.
Iran has called repeatedly for Israel's destruction and dissidents, religious minorities and homosexuals are persecutaed by the Islamic regime.
In the article, BILD quoted Michael Spaney, director of ‘’Stop the Bomb’’, a Berlin-based organization that seeks to stop Tehran’s drive to become a nuclear-armed power and promotes human rights in the Iran: "Iran's responsibility for more than 200.000 deaths and millions of refugees in Syria is ignored. Iran's responsibility for the strengthening of IS in Iraq and Syria is swept under the carpet.
Iran's current involvement in the Shiite takeover of Yemen is pushed aside.
The Iranian role in the murder case of the Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nismans in the last week seems to not to be an issue. Even Iran's support of the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas with weapons and funds is left out.
The wish to include the terror exporter Iran in the fight against terrorism is absurd and dangerous."
‘’It is a scandal that two weeks after Islamist attacks in Paris, a high-ranking delegation of German parliamentarians is having meetings with terrorists and Holocaust deniers in Iran, ‘‘Stop the Bomb’’ said.
Roth defended her visit, saying that it covered “Iran’s security role” in foreign policy and that it also addressed the human rights situation in Iran.
She said she had fought aginst-anti-Semitism in Germany and around the world.
‘’The first date of my program in Iran was a visit to the Jewish community and the Jewish hospital in Tehran. I have also given a clear signal,’’ she said.
Roth has gained a controversial reputation because of her sympathy for Iran’s regime under Ahmadinejad and Rouhani.