NGO slams Bundestag deputies for meeting Iranian Holocaust denier, hostage taker

Stop the Bomb is a European-wide organization that seeks to stop Iran’s drive to become a nuclear-armed power, and promotes human rights in the Islamic Republic.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
Bundestag Vice President Claudia Roth (Green Party), Dagmar Wöhrl (Christian Social Union party) are the two women on the right (photo credit: TWITTER)
Bundestag Vice President Claudia Roth (Green Party), Dagmar Wöhrl (Christian Social Union party) are the two women on the right
(photo credit: TWITTER)
BERLIN – An NGO in the German capital sharply criticized a delegation of lawmakers for their current trip to Iran, which includes meetings with a Holocaust denier and an official involved in the kidnapping of American diplomatic personnel in 1979.
“In the face of the current wave of executions in Iran, speaking about ‘efforts to open up Iranian society’ is brazen. 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 spokeswoman Ulrike Becker said on Tuesday.
Stop the Bomb is a European- wide organization that seeks to stop Iran’s drive to become a nuclear-armed power, and promotes human rights in the Islamic Republic.
Bundestag Vice President Claudia Roth (Green Party), Dagmar Wöhrl (Christian Social Union party) and Stefan Rebmann (Social Democrats) left for Tehran on Wednesday. The five-day trip includes meetings with Ali Larijani, the president of the Majlis parliament, who denied the Holocaust at the 2009 Munich Security Conference.
He defended the then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime, saying it had “different perspectives on the Holocaust.”
The German deputies are slated to meet 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.
A picture circulated on social media show Roth and Wöhrl wearing head scarves in Iran.
Stop the Bomb tweeted the photograph, writing “Shameful cozying up to regime of terrorists.”
According to Roth’s website, the trip covers “Iran’s security role” in foreign policy and diminishing the “humanitarian catastrophe in the region.”
She said the visit will also address the human rights situation in Iran.
Roth, who has gained a reputation of promoting Iran’s regime during the Ahmadinejad and Rouhani periods, remains controversial in Germany. She was caught on video in 2013 at the Munich Security conference high-fiving Iran’s then-ambassador to Germany Reza Sheikh Attar, whom Iranian Kurdish dissidents accuse of massacring Kurds during his tenure as governor of the Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan provinces between 1980 and 1985. Germany’s largest daily paper, Bild, dubbed her “Loser of the Day” on its front page because of her sympathy for Iran’s regime.