The New Kill-Israel Axis

By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | 2/26/2008

Iran wants to hang the Jewish state--and Germany and Austria are
selling it the rope.

Earlier this month when Austrian foreign minister Ursula Plassnik
visited Israel, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and foreign
minister Tzipi Livni tried to convince her of the importance of strong
sanctions against Teheran. There's no evidence they had any success;
Austrian-Iranian ties appear to be too lucrative for such persuasion
to work.

In April 2007 the Austrian oil company OMV signed a major deal with
Iran for a joint natural gas project. As Simone Dinah Hartmann of
STOPTHEBOMB noted Monday in an informative op-ed,

The total investment amounts to 22 billion euros over the next 25
years. Experts believe that these revenues will be used to finance the
Iranian nuclear weapons program and undermine present international
sanctions.

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Austria's Social Democratic chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer has said his
government will not interfere in business transactions. But this is at
best a bad joke: the state of Austria holds 31.5% of OMV's shares. The
company's CEO, Wolfgang Ruttensdorfer, is a former official of the
Social Democratic party, which has always been tight with OMV.

Indeed, as Hartmann further points out,

this deal [with Iran] is backed by all parties represented in the
Austrian parliament. Social Democrats, Conservatives, Greens and the
far right have closed ranks against demands to cancel the negotiations
with Iran.

This wall-to-wall unity is in the service of a venerable tradition:
OMV, a firm with a good nose for carrion, was selling gas to the
Soviet Union just after it crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, to Libya
in the 1980s, and to Sudan from the late 1990s till 2003 when it was
the last international corporation to leave the country. State-backed
OMV is always looking for a new venture in tyranny, terror, and mass
murder to fuel, and these days what better client is there than the
mullahs?

And OMV is only the cutting edge of the relationship; Austria's total
exports to Iran have doubled since 2002. Still, the OMV deal could
catapult this trade from millions to billions, and it's no surprise
that the president of Iran's Chamber of Commerce, Ali Naghi Khamoushi,
said in November 2006 that "Austria is the gate to the European Union
for us."

The OMV deal has drawn criticism in the West, including from German
chancellor Angela Merkel.

But as a recent Jerusalem Post editorial noted, "this is close to the
pot calling the kettle black."

Germany, too, treats Teheran as a market it can't do without: "Germany
is Iran's largest European trading partner and has been the most
resistant to tightening sanctions among the pivotal EU-3--the UK,
France and Germany."

Another of the Post's recent important articles on Europe and Iran
gives more of the details:

In 2007, Germany sold EURO 3.5 billion of goods to Iran, including EURO 1.5
billion worth of engineering products and high tech equipment.
Security and terrorism experts argue that Germany is uniquely
positioned to tighten the economic screws on Iran.

...The growing infrastructure of the Iranian economy is heavily
dependent on German technological know-how. Michael Tockuss, the
former president of the German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce in Teheran,
said, "Some two-thirds of Iranian industry relies on German
engineering products."

...Critics assert that sophisticated engineering technology lends itself
to "dual-usage," and can be rapidly converted for nuclear military
purposes.

...Siemens . . . whose economic deals total over half a billion dollars
in Iran, conceded in late January that it spent EURO 19 million to bribe
Iranian officials to do business with it....

Although German exports to Iran shrank by 15% percent last year [a
claim that has been placed in doubt], a dramatic 50% increase of
Iranian exports to Germany, totaling EURO 580 million, took place in 2007.

It's not that Germany and Austria are Iran's only partners in Europe.
Just in the past year Dutch, Spanish, and Norwegian firms have been
dealing and talking with Teheran on natural gas projects. Total,
France's oil company, continues to invest millions per year in the
mullahcracy. And while 40% of Iran's trade is with Europe, only 1% of
Europe's trade is with Iran--yet even this Europe is loath to give up.

Still, for Israel the leading roles of Germany and Austria have a
special resonance. For these two countries--which in March will be
marking seventy years since their Anschluss--the first Holocaust was
largely a matter of ideology. The second, if it transpires, will be a
matter of heaps of shiny euros.

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P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel
Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/