President Barack Obama witnessed the Nazi ovens of the Buchenwald concentration camp Friday, its clock tower frozen at the time of liberation, and said the leaders of today must not rest against the spread of evil.
The president called the camp where an estimated 56,000 people died the “ultimate rebuke” to Holocaust deniers and skeptics. And he bluntly challenged one of them, Iranian President Ahmadinejad, to visit Buchenwald.
“These sites have not lost their horror with the passage of time,” Obama said after seeing crematory ovens, barbed-wire fences, guard towers and the clock set at 3:15, marking the camp’s liberation in the afternoon of April 11, 1945. “More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished.”
Buchenwald “teaches us that we must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem, and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests,” Obama said.
Obama became the first U.S. president to visit the Buchenwald concentration camp. It was, in part, a personal visit: His great-uncle helped liberate a nearby satellite camp, Ohrdruf, in early April 1945 just days before other U.S. Army units overran Buchenwald.
The president also announced he was dispatching special envoy George J. Mitchell back to the region next week to follow up on Obama’s speech in Cairo a day earlier in which he called for both Israelis and Palestinians to make concessions in the standoff.
Fresh from visits to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Obama said that while regional and worldwide powers must help achieve peace, responsibility ultimately falls to Israelis and Palestinians to reach an accord.
He said Israel must live up to commitments it made under the so-called “Road Map” peace outline to stop constructing settlements, adding: “I recognize the very difficult politics in Israel of getting that done.” He also said the Palestinians must control violence-inciting acts and statements, saying that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas “has made progress on this issue, but not enough.”
After urging Israel and the Palestinians to find a way to compromise, the president made a point Friday to highlight the example of post-war Europe.
“You now have a unified Europe and a Germany that is a very close ally of Israel,” Mr. Obama said Friday, hoping the imagery would prompt the parties in the Mideast to envision a future without the horrors of warfare.
Elie Wiesel, a 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, author and Holocaust survivor whose father died of starvation at Buchenwald three months before liberation, and Bertrand Herz, also a Buchenwald survivor; accompanied Obama and Merkel at the camp. Each laid a long-stemmed white rose at a memorial. They were later joined by Volkhard Knigge, head of the Buchenwald memorial.
“To this day, there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened,” Obama said. “This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.”
It was a pointed message to Iran’s Ahmadinejad, who has expressed doubts that 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.
“He should make his own visit” to Buchenwald, Obama told NBC earlier Friday. He added: “I have no patience for people who would deny history.”
Separately, the president told reporters: “The international community has an obligation, even when it’s inconvenient, to act when genocide is occurring.”
(Source: CBS)
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8 Responses
If he thinks this will get us to support him, he has another think coming. Israel is what we care about.
. It was, in part, a personal visit: His great-uncle helped liberate a nearby satellite camp, Ohrdruf, in early April 1945 just days before other U.S. Army units overran Buchenwald.
THIS IS NOT TRUE.the man NEVER spoke to Pres B O about this,(as per Rush Limbaugh)
The great uncle was never in the EAST,that liberation was carried out by the Soviet Russians.
“The international community has an obligation, even when it’s inconvenient, to act when genocide is occurring.”
And yet the man mentions nothing about Darfur… Interesting…
The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial (which is very conservative on it editorial, arguably to the right of Atilla the Hun), wrote on article on the speech in Cairo with the caption “Barack Husein Bush” suggesting all President Obama did was recycle what President Bush has been saying, but making it sound better (so should we really be happy if we ended up with an eloquent Bush, and “change” means form rather substance).
How many days to the next election?
As usual Mr B. Hussein Osama plays the double talk game up to a hilt.
This is noting more than cheap lip service meant for the gullible ears of those wishful thinkers who still want to believe that this Muslim leader sympathizes with us Jews more than with his fellow Arabs.
How can one get up in the very place where Jews were systematically murdered, and with no shame speak about being “vigilant about the spreading of evil in our time” while at the same time embrace and legitimize a terrorist organization who is preoccupied with repeating precisely the same kind of thing today???
Such a panderer!
To #2: Meir Birnbaum has an entire chapter in his book, Lt. Birnbaum, about he and his unit entering and liberating Ohrdruf. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh should read it.
To #2 and #7:
I think there’s some confusion here. What Rush actually said was that Obama had claimed that his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz, which was in fact liberated by the Soviets. It was Obama’s uncle who corrected the record and said he’d been at Buchenwald, and that his nephew had never asked him about it.