Germany is siding with terrorists in the Middle East, says an Iranian-American journalist and activist, Masih Alinejad, after government officials refused to meet with her publicly to discuss Iran’s human rights violations. 

Ms. Alinejad abandoned a meeting scheduled with the German foreign ministry’s human rights commissioner, Luise Amtsberg, who insisted not only that they meet in private, but that she promise to not write about it on social media. That came after the foreign minister of Germany, Annalena Baerbock, declined to meet with Ms. Alinejad, who is fighting for human rights — especially women’s rights — in the Islamic Republic. 

The commissioner refused to publicize her meeting with a “radical” enemy of the Islamic regime because, Ms. Alinejad tells the Sun, “she was worried about losing her credibility among Muslim women.” Ms. Alinejad says, though, that “if saying no to a barbaric regime which killed children and women means being radical, I’m so proud of being labeled as such.”

Joining Ms. Alinejad’s walk-out in protest was one of the victims of this abuse, the 26-year-old Iranian activist, Sima Moradbeigi. She was shot in the arm by the main branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in July, while protesting in the streets of Azerbaijan as part of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, which advocates for democracy alongside women’s liberation in Iran.

Before leaving the room with the commissioner last week, Ms. Moradbeigi exposed her hair, and, as Ms. Alinejad recalls, asserted, “we get killed in Iran because of showing this hair. So why should we hide this in Germany, a democracy?” 

Ms. Amtsberg wasted no time in using her own platform to defend herself on the grounds that “confidential discussions are more substantive,” she wrote on X last week. “I deeply regret that Ms. Alinejad conditioned a conversation to the publication of the meeting’s content and left before we had a chance to talk. I am sure we would have had a meaningful exchange.”

“I will continue to name the serious human rights violations of the Iranian regime,” Ms. Amtsberg said, and “support of the Iranian civil society.” Her behavior, observes British-German journalist, Alan Posener, in a German newspaper, is “disturbing.” He asks: “Is Luise Amtsberg practicing selective morality?”

European leaders’ support for women’s rights, says Ms. Alinejad, is riddled with hypocrisy. They will discard their democratic values to openly do business with Islamic Republic officials, even if they are supposed to be sanctioned. “You stand publicly shoulder-to-shoulder with them,” she says of these elected officials, “and now you want to hide us, who are the victims of these killers?”

The German capital has emerged as one of the largest sites of solidarity for the Iranian diaspora. Last October, 80,000 Iranians and their supporters marched at Berlin in support of the rallies triggered by the death of a young Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, after being arrested for wearing her headscarf too loosely. 

Yet some human rights organizations and Western feminists, argues Ms. Alinejad, echo the narrative sold to them by the Islamic Republic — that challenging their regime is “islamophobic,” or “cultural relativist.” Any attempts to justify brutality, Ms. Alinejad argues, empower the Islamic Republic and other terrorist organizations to double down on their abuses against women. 

Women are not their only targets. One well-known hostage of the regime is a German-Iranian political dissident, Jamshid Sharmahd, who is also a permanent resident of America. He is on death row in Iran on the unclear charge of “corruption on earth.”

The Iranian regime economically and militarily funds Hamas, aided the Wagner group’s revolt in Russia, and, Ms. Alinejad says, is “the biggest sponsor of terrorist proxies in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.”

Leading economies, though, have yet to pursue a common strategy or policy to quell terrorism. Meanwhile, Communist China has served as a mediator between Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic as it cozies up to dictatorships harboring terrorist groups. 

“If you are really looking for stability in the region for business,”  says Ms. Alinejad of government and business leaders in Europe, “then an Iran without the Islamic Republic will benefit you more.”

Ms. Alinejad has faced death threats because of her activism. In January, three men were allegedly tasked by Iran with assassinating her in her Brooklyn home. She has not, however, quieted down, asserting instead that “human rights abuse should be condemned loudly.” 

Soon after Ms. Alinejad shared — on social media, no less — details of the unfulfilled meeting on Friday, parliamentarians, human rights activists emerged to support her. Harnessing this momentum, she is now calling on the foreign minister, Ms. Baerbock, and the leaders of other democracies, to meet with women who were injured protesting the Islamic Republic, like Ms. Moradbeigi. 

“Instead of publishing my photo,” Ms. Alinejad says of her critics in government and the media, “publish her photo.”