Richard Grenell, the US government’s most high-profile ambassador, on Wednesday sharply criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government for its blasé dismissal of Iran’s threat to destroy the Jewish state.
“Threatening the destruction of Israel is something that should not be dismissed, especially when the threats come from Iranian regime officials who regularly use terrorism as a weapon of intimidation. When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” Grenell, told Fox News.
The pro-Israel US ambassador Grenell, who enjoys enormous popularity among German Jews, pro-Israel advocates and Israeli government officials, responded to two Iranian officials who called for the obliteration of Israel in October.
Mojtaba Zonnour, chairman of National Security and Foreign Policy Committee in Iran’s Majlis legislature,: “If Israel or America make a mistake, Israel won’t live for longer than 20 or 30 minutes.”
Major General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), told an audience of IRGC leaders, declared, “This sinister regime [Israel] must be wiped off the map and this is no longer… a dream [but] it is an achievable goal.”
He said the Islamic Republic of Iran had “managed to obtain the capacity to destroy the impostor Zionist regime.”
When asked by Fox News whether the statements by Salami and Zonnour are antisemitic, Grenell said, “Yes.”
A spokesman for German foreign minister Heiko Maas told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that “We condemn the recent threats by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps against Israel in the strongest possible terms. Such anti-Israel rhetoric is completely unacceptable. Israel’s right to exist is not negotiable. We urge Iran to commit to maintaining peaceful relations with all states in the region and to take practical steps to de-escalate tensions.”
A Merkel representative from her spokesman Steffen Seibert's office simply repeated that Iran’s threats to wipe Israel off the map are “anti-Israel rhetoric.”When pressed by the Post if the Iranian regime’s call to exterminate the nearly 7 million Jews in Israel meets the definition of antisemitism, the spokespeople said it is just “anti-Israel rhetoric.”
The Post first reported on Merkel's administration labelling Iran's call to destroy Israel "anti-Israel rhetoric" and not antisemitism.
Antisemitism experts in the United States and Germany expressed outrage over the Merkel government’s cavalier attitude toward Iran’s genocidal antisemitism targeting Israel.
The Hamburg-based political scientist Dr. Matthias Küntzel wrote on the website of Perlentaucher on Thursday:”While Berlin has no problem describing a Nazi who wants to wipe out Israel as an antisemite, in the case of Iran sugarcoated language is cultivated: Here one shies away from the A-word; here you want to leave it with the term ‘anti-Israel rhetoric. '' '
The “A-Word “is a reference to antisemitsim.
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