A top German newspaper on Tuesday called on the government in Berlin to suspend all trade ties with Iran over its terrorism and its repeated called for Israel's annihilation.
In an article in Germany's most widely read daily newspaper Bild, Julian Roepcke, the paper's foreign news editor, argued that Iran's missile strikes in Syria this weekend "under the auspices of the 'war on terror' might sound good, but the opposite is true. The missiles themselves are a message of terror, because they carry inscriptions reading 'Death to Israel and 'Death to the USA' – and that is deadly serious for the mullahs."
Iran's missiles, he continued "were not fired against Islamic State, but rather against those who stand in the way of the corrupt regime in Tehran, against those who do not want to stand idly by as Iran's leaders, again and again, call for the 'extermination' of Israel. By the mullahs' crazy logic, ISIS is also the creation of the heinous West, the U.S. and Israel," he wrote.
"Iran cannot be an ally at this time, neither in the fight against terrorism nor as an oil supplier or trade partner," Roepcke concluded.
The United States pulled out of a 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran earlier this year and subsequently reimposed economic sanctions on the Islamic republic. Since then, the European signatories to the accord – Britain, Germany and France – have been trying to come up with ways to salvage the agreement, chiefly a mechanism that would allow for trade with Iran to continue despite the American sanctions.
The Bild is Germany's most widely circulated daily, printing 2.7 million copies a day. Between its various platforms, the paper, which is considered pro-Israel, has an average daily readership of 12 million.
