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.I don't expect Ahmadinejad or any of the others, including Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, to change their tune about Holocaust denial anytime soon. It's ingrained in their rhetoric that the Holocaust didn't happen, that it was wildly overblown, and invented by the Jews to demand and obtain what would later become the state of Israel.
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.
What remains bothersome is that Obama downplays the fact that Ahmadinejad is using genocidal language in relation to Israel's existence, all while Iran pursues nuclear technologies in conjunction with missile technologies that are highly suggestive that Iran seeks to obliterate Israel with nuclear weapons and to threaten the rest of the region with a similar fate.
It's an existential threat, and Iran uses the Holocaust denial to continue undermining Israel's sovereignty in international organizations like the United Nations and other international confabs.
UPDATE:
Video of the speech:
No comments:
Post a Comment