GENEVA (JTA) — The Geneva Jewish community held a ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day opposite the United Nations.
Monday’s ceremony — featuring speeches by survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel, French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levi and former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler — took place in the plaza opposite the Palais des Nations, the European seat of the United Nations, just hours after a virulently anti-Israel speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Little mention was made of Ahmadinejad during the somber ceremony, which was held under heavy guard. But Cotler, addressing an audience estimated at 3,000, said that Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric amounted to the crime of incitement to genocide and that confronting him wasn’t a policy option but an international legal responsibility.
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