Swiss efforts for White House anger Israel

Israel recalled its ambassador to Switzerland after the Swiss did the Obama administration’s bidding in meeting with the Iranians to lobby for the release of an American journalist.

In denouncing the eight-year espionage sentence for Fargo, N.D., native Roxana Saberi, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday that “we are working closely with the Swiss Protecting Presence to obtain details about the court’s decision, and to ensure her well-being.”

{mosads}Switzerland represents U.S. interests in Iran since the U.S. does not have an embassy in Tehran.

Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ahead of the U.N. racism conference dubbed Durban II that began in Geneva on Monday. President Obama said Sunday that the Swiss would be taking American concerns about Saberi to the Iranians, and the Swiss confirmed this indeed occurred.

“Switzerland has been representing U.S. interests in Iran since 1980,” said a Sunday release from the Swiss government. “Within the scope of this mandate undertaken by Switzerland as a protecting power, various unresolved cases of consular protection were discussed, including the sentencing of the American-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi.”

Israel recalled its ambassador for “consultations” Monday morning in protest of the meeting.

“The meeting of a president of a democratic country with a notorious Holocaust denier such as the Iranian president, who has openly declared his intention of wiping Israel off the map, is not in keeping with the values represented by Switzerland — values that are supposed to be displayed at the UN Conference Against Racism (Durban 2), which opened today in Geneva,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “The incident is further aggravated by the fact that the meeting took place on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day when we commemorate the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.”

French, Finnish and British diplomats walked out of Ahmadinejad’s Monday speech in which he said that the state of Israel had been founded “on the pretext of Jewish suffering” during World War II and called Israel the “most cruel and repressive racist regime.” The U.S. boycotted the conference.

Alejandro Wolff, the U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations, denounced “the Ahmadinejad spectacle” as “vile and hateful speech.”

The Ahmadinejad rant adds another obstacle, in addition to the imprisonment of Saberi, to the Obama administration’s rapprochement attempts with Iran.