France and Germany, Have You No Shame?

When you think certain nations have descended to the ultimate moral nadir of the universe, you never fail to be astonished with just how much farther they are capable of descending.

A report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal states that France and Germany have just linked forces to salvage an effort to create back-channel payments to Iran, defying the U.S.-led effort to sanction the regime for its nuclear activity. This effort, known as “Special Forces Vehicle,” or SPV, amounts to nothing more than a brazen effort by the two nations to diminish the effort to sanction the Islamic Republic for their work towards making a nuclear bomb.

Simply for money.

France has a long and sorry history of helping the enemies of the Jewish state develop the means of genocide, simply for money. In 1976, Saddam Hussein’s government purchased the Iraqi nuclear reactor, the Osirak, from France. Saddam of yesterday—like the leaders of Iran today—had made clear exactly what his intention was. In numerous speeches, Saddam had pledged to “scorch half of Israel.”

During World War II, the French Vichy government, along with the French police force, eagerly linked forces with the Nazis to round up Jews and put them in concentration camps, diminishing their Jewish population by roughly one-quarter.

And Germany: Have you no shame?

Just this past Saturday, Hassan Rouhani, the so-called “moderate” president of Iran, called Israel “a cancerous tumor” and a “fake regime,” created in the aftermath of World War II in order to advance the interests of Western countries.

There are three reasons to be very concerned about this statement.

First of all, what “moderate” calls for the extermination of a nation?

Secondly, we Jews have learned from our long and painful history that when leaders evoke biological analogies to “cancers” or “vermin,” they are desensitizing their populations in order to objectify and dehumanize us, to clear their populace of any remnant of remaining empathy towards us before doing something truly egregious.

And finally, the fact that Israel has been referred to as a “fake regime” is simply the au current way of wiping out our history and delegitimizing our genuine claim to the land, as the original indigenous people of Israel—a claim that has been verified over and over again by mountains of historic, genealogical and anthropological evidence.

However, the chilling and critical fact is that the Iranians have most likely kept their nuclear infrastructure in place, and the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) has not been living up to its verification responsibilities.

A treasure trove of documents was retrieved by the Israelis in their stunning raid on the Iranian nuclear documents depot in Tehran earlier this year, led the Institute for Science and International Security to issue a new report on Nov. 20. The report states that the Iranians intended to build five nuclear weapons, and “that Iran had put in place by the end of 2003 the infrastructure for a comprehensive nuclear-weapons program. The evidence supports that Iran was preparing to conduct and underground test of a nuclear-weapons program. The end goal was to have tested, deliverable nuclear weapons, and Iran made more progress toward that goal than known before the seizure of the archives.”

The Institute for Science and International Security, of course, puts the onus on Iran for disclosing the information and granting access to both sites and individuals. It emphatically states, however, that:

“It is the responsibility of the IAEA and member states to ensure that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is ended in an irretrievable permanent manner. … Although absence of progress on this critical issue if largely due to lack of Iranian cooperation, fault also lies with some who negotiated the JCPOA and have failed to empower the IAEA do so. There is no visible indication that the IAEA is yet acting on this new information.”

This report, which should have made headlines, also states that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, only “helped limit the uranium and plutonium enrichment programs, creating a bottleneck that will eventually end. Once it does, Iran will still maintain all the infrastructure and weapons to build weapons at a later date. The current U.S. strategy to ramp up pressure through sanctions is probably the best way to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.”

And finally, the report states that “the IAEA’s unwillingness to ask to inspect the warehouse site and its slow response to acting on the information in the archives after being secretly briefed about their existence and purpose from Israel raises questions about the IAEA’s impartiality and ability to verify both the JCPOA and Iran’s nonproliferation commitments. It is not only the Secretariat, but the IAEA Board of Governors, which has not lived up to its task. They have created a double nonproliferation standard which, unless remedied, will decrease the chance of ensuring Iran does not build nuclear weapons and will serve as a playbook for future proliferators.”

France: Avez-vous pas honte? Germany: Haste du keine Schande?

And to all of those members of the international community, including those of the Obama administration who were responsible for negotiating the grossly inadequate JCPOA in 2015: Have you no shame?

Originally published: https://www.jns.org/opinion/france-and-germany-have-you-no-shame/

Photo: AFP