BERN (EJP)---A European Jewish leader has written to Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey demanding he withdraws a reported offer to host a Conference on ’Selective Perceptions of the Holocaust’.

Calmy-Rey is believed to have made the offer to Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Jalili during a meeting in Berne in December 2006 when Calmy-Rey was then the foreign minister of Switzerland.

The meeting was revealed by Zurich-based daily Weltwoche in a report last week.

Weltwoche claimed to possess a confidential document detailing a
Calmy-Rey’s proposal to Iran.

According to Weltwoche the meeting took place around the same time as a Holocaust Denial conference was being held in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

Withdraw or deny

In a letter to Calmy-Rey, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Director for
International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, noted that "the
coordinator of the Tehran conference – Iranian Foreign Minister
Mottaki – admitted at the World Economic Forum in Jordan last month
that he acknowledged the reality of the Holocaust but that he had
aimed to politically embarrass the West to serve his objectives in the
Middle East."

Samuels continued, "Madam President, if you, indeed, made this
conference proposal, Switzerland has in one move compromised its
status of neutrality.

"You have, thereby, served the Iranian political agenda, encouraging
the most extreme rejectionists of any hope of Middle East peace, and
offered a platform for every neo-Nazi and antisemitic Holocaust
denier."

The Centre urged the President "to publicly deny or withdraw this
outrageous proposal, and to apologize for its offence to all survivors
of the Holocaust and the memory of its victims."›