The Islamic Republic of Iran casts a large net in its policy of hostage diplomacy. While the Obama and Biden administrations implement ransom schemes and prisoner swaps to release American hostages, the Iranian regime holds French, Swedish, British, and German citizens.
Pity the two German hostages, Jamshid “Jimmy” Sharmahd and Nahid Taghavi. Revolutionary courts sentenced dissident, journalist, and U.S. resident Sharmahd, whom Iranian agents kidnapped from the United Arab Emirates, to death on charges of “corruption on earth.”
While other countries seek to release their hostages, the taxpayer-funded Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP, German Institute for International and Security Affairs), the German foreign ministry’s think tank, appears to counsel throwing in the towel.
Guido Steinberg, a senior associate in SWP’s Africa and the Middle East division, told the German weekly Stern following the death sentence, “We have to assume that there is no way to get Mr. Sharmahd out through a deal.” Sharmahd’s daughter Gazelle was outraged, telling Focus on Western Islamism, “Guido’s disinformation is life-threatening to my father and has contributed to [his] utter failure and abandonment.” Indeed, Germany has levers of pressure to alter Iran’s behavior, including closing Iran’s embassy in Germany and pulling the plug on its billion-euro trade relationship.
SWP’s unwillingness to hold the Islamic Republic to account has become the rule rather than the exception. In 2008, the Wall Street Journal related that SWP’s former director Volker Perthes had “been lobbying for more than two years for a ‘strategic partnership’ with a Holocaust-denying regime that sponsors international terror and suppresses its own people.”
Steinberg argued in a second Stern interview that he opposed designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization on the grounds that it is a “normal military force.” Such an argument ignores that the Revolutionary Guards maintains an intelligence apparatus engaged in repression at home and, via its networks, abroad. As Gazelle noted, “It is as if the Islamic regime and the German foreign ministry jointly dictated the perfect excuse statement for why they cannot save their kidnapped citizen and should not list the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.”
In an email to this writer, Steinberg said he advocates for the German government to outlaw the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qods Force, a unit conducting foreign terrorist operations. Steinberg, however, did not answer a query about Sharmahd’s plight. Nor did he comment on the 2017 German court’s conviction of a Pakistani involved in an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plot to assassinate pro-Israel advocates in Israel.
Nor is Steinberg alone in his apologia for terror at SWP. In July 2024, three months before Hamas killed more than 1,200 Jews in a terrorist attack, Israel’s embassy in Berlin criticized SWP Senior Fellow Muriel Asseburg for suggesting Palestinian terrorist attacks were insignificant and “violent resistance” was valid. She also suggested that Jerusalem controls the German parliament, a line consistence with both German Islamists and neo-Nazis. Rather than acknowledge the error, SWP defended it.
Not every think tank scholar deserves attention. Many radicals rant, but SWP remains the ideas factory for the German diplomatic elite. For Berlin to throw its own citizens under the bus and encourage terrorism signals to Iranian leaders that they can target German dissidents without consequence. Rather than stand for freedom, SWP and the German Foreign Ministry appear to undermine it.
