European Commission President Romano Prodi hinted yesterday that he would like a seminar on anti-Semitism in Europe to take place as scheduled in February - a day after cancelling it in anger over a newspaper article.
Mr Prodi had proposed the seminar as a forum for Jewish leaders to discuss the problem with EU officials, but called it off when two prominent Jewish leaders accused the EU executive he heads of anti-Semitism and self-censorship.
Asked yesterday at his news conference in Dublin if he still wanted the meeting to go ahead, Mr Prodi said he hoped "to have the conditions to resume it soon".
He did not spell out the conditions but appeared to be angling for some sort of apology from World Jewish Congress president Mr Edgar Bronfman and European Jewish Congress president Mr Cobi Benatoff, who wrote the article in Monday's Financial Times claiming that the European Commission "censored a study commissioned by its own Monitoring Centre that reported on the involvement of Muslim minorities in incidents" of anti-semitism.
A spokesman for the World Jewish Congress in New York said that if the Commission thought there was anything incorrect with the Financial Times article, the Congress would be "pleased to hear any technical correction" to it. But he said the issue was a wider one.
"The European Commission has failed in its moral responsibility," said his spokesman, Mr Elan Steinberg.
The opinion article also condemned the Commission for a public opinion poll, part of its Eurobarometer series, "which purported to name Israel as the greatest threat to world peace".
Yesterday, Mr Prodi said Jewish leaders had responded enthusiastically when he first proposed the seminar in response to the opinion poll which showed 57 percent of Europeans saw Israel as a threat to world peace, and to a spate of attacks on Jewish targets in Europe.
Mr Prodi said that the Commission and Jewish representatives were already working on organising the seminar when the article was published.
"Then I read the article . . . in the Financial Times. I have no explanation for that," Mr Prodi told the news conference.
"Certainly, there is no, no, no problem on the Commission's side." - (Reuters)