Obama: Ahmadinejad Should Come Visit Concentration Camp (VIDEO)

UPDATE:

President Obama visited a World War II concentration camp Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Holocaust survivors Elie Wiesel and Bertrand Herz, the AP reports.

"These sites have not lost their horror with the passage of time," Obama said after seeing crematory ovens, barbed-wire fences and guard towers at Buchenwald. "More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished."

Here is a video of the visit:

***

Check out this video of President Obama talking to Tom Brokaw during his trip to Dresden, Germany. Obama talks about how World War II affected his own grandparents. (Scroll down to tell HuffPost how D-Day affected your family.) Obama also talks about his upcoming visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Nazi death camp held 250,000 prisoners during the war, and more than 50,000 died there.

When asked what Iranian President Ahmadinejad could learn from Obama's visit to the Nazi concentration camp, Obama says: "He should make his own visit... I have no patience for people who would deny history."

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Comments

[gakabani]

11:36 PM on 06/07/2009

The holocuast is an European catastrophe fir Europeans to remember and never repeat again; however said, it us clear that the blame game has been transfused to the Palestininas as if they were the responsible party fir the Holocaust. Never again means never again for anyone. It is hypocritical and inhumann to let Palestininas pay the price for the atrocities committed by the uncivilized and racist Europeans.

[george389]

11:15 PM on 06/24/2009

this has absolutely nothing to do with palestine. but the mufti of jerusalem was allied with hitler so he did play a part

[AhnAmuru]

12:25 AM on 06/07/2009

Today, is not a day for politics ... (Mindless menace of violence. RFK).

I, for one, blocked out my mind to politics and listened to Leo Fuld all evening.

[knosiswar]

10:11 PM on 06/06/2009

Can anyone point to where Ahmadinejad has denied the deaths during WWII. It is my understanding that Ahmadinejad's message is that he doesn't believe that what happened in WWII was a justifiable reason to remove Palestinians from their land. Palestinians took no part in WWII but it was their land that was stolen from them.

Whose land are we going to seize for an Armenian state.

Whose land are we going to seize for the Native American State.

Ahmadinejad's point is their have been many casualties of war, but it was the Roman nobles, progenitors of the Byzantine Hapsburgs, that took the Jewish lands, and slaughtered 'God's chosen people'.
So he asks the question, what legitimate claim do Ashkenazi Jews have to Palestine?

Answer?

[FrankenPC]

01:01 PM on 06/06/2009

Can someone explain why the Palestinians and the Israelis can't simply merge their two societies? In America, we have a snapshot of every culture around the world living together. What's the problem?

Israel has a lot to offer. Schools, police protection. Hospitals? I don't get it.

[arle]

05:30 PM on 06/06/2009

Israel doesn't want to share. In fact, if many Israelis had their way, they'd box up all of the Arabs and ship them out to Jordan.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/03/jordan-palestinian-homela_n_210833.html
53 out of 120 votes. That was less than ten percent away from passing.

[FrankenPC]

01:27 PM on 06/07/2009

So it boiled down to a Hatfield vs McCoy feud. That's pathetic.

[SpiralDenial]

12:34 AM on 06/07/2009

It's a family feud that's been going on for over 2000 years. Expecting rational behavior from either side is irrational.

[arle]

09:54 AM on 06/06/2009

Yeah, well, Obama should stop getting his "translations" from propaganda factories like MEMRI. These articles tell the truth of what was really said by Ahmedinejad:
http://www.arbeiterfotografie.de/iran/index-iran-0013.html
http://www.arbeiterfotografie.com/iran/index-iran-0037.html

[morgan1]

07:38 AM on 06/06/2009

This is condescending for Obama to toss out this "dare", and not the way to approach diplomacy. I believe Obama should take a walk around Palestine and see how they have to live and what Israel has done to them and their culture. He should go to Nigeria and see what Big Oil has done to their country and their health issues. He should spend a day at Abu Ghraib behind bars, and talk to the prisoners, and see what we have done (He should do that at Gitmo as well considering we have broken the treaty with Cuban by making it a prison camp). Last, he should do the SEER and find out what torture really is.

[johndordan]

08:52 PM on 06/05/2009

I think Obama should visit GAZA. The massacre at Gaza happened just a couple of months ago.

[ModernTimes1]

01:51 AM on 06/06/2009

Gaza war-- about 1500 casualties, not clear how many where Hamas terrorists.
Hamas militants were kept in a separate, better equipped hospital and never, ever appeared in the photos manufactured fro the world media.

Shi Lank-- about 25 thousand dead just weeks ago. That's the place for Obama to go to.

[FrankenPC]

02:18 PM on 06/06/2009

Darfur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Darfur

The casualty list over a 5 year span could be over a million. Hard to take a census when the raped and annihilated corpses are buried in mass unmarked graves.

My point being, there are too many places to visit for one man alone.

[tploomis]

07:00 PM on 06/05/2009

I think that all leaders of nations with nuclear weapons and leaders of nations aspiring to acquire nuclear weapons should visit the atom bomb memorial museums in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to get a glimpse of the horrors of nuclear war and to understand the incredible responsibility that comes with possession of weapons that can do that level of damage.

[Chopin]

11:30 PM on 06/05/2009

You made an excellent cogent point. In pragmatic "realpolitik", that of course is unlikely to happen. Those who have not been traumatized by living through a shooting war would find it hard to connect emotionally to the immense suffering and destruction caused by a modern total war.

Pres. Ob is a deeply and truly empathic kind of leader who might become the first postwar modern head of state to succeed in setting the nations around the globe on a total nuclear disarmament course. It's a tall order. There're still tens of thousands of nuclear missiles and megaton-warheads poised to go off.

Jonathan Schell in his book "The Fate of the Earth" (over 20 years ago) pointed out that the likelihood of a nuclear war happening is actually higher when most people around the world have forgotten about the perils and unimaginable destruction and suffering in a nuclear war, like in these times.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=jonathan+schell+the+fate+of+the+earth&aq=1&oq=jonathan+schell&aqi=g10
.

[didntvote4thedude]

04:36 PM on 06/05/2009

I guess that BHO is trying to top Reagan's "Hey Gorby, tear down the wall" speech.
Nice try.
I double dare. How's that?

[Anare]

04:19 PM on 06/05/2009

I made a visit to Germany some years back. On a train, my mother and I struck up a conversation with some German citizens and we got on the topic of WWII. My mother complimented one German traveler for his excellent English, much better than our half-assed German. He said he learned to speak English when he was a POW of the Americans during the war. Sometime later in the conversation my Mother noted that her cousin, with whom she was very close, was shot down over Germany and his remains were never recovered. It was so moving for me, to listen to these people’s stories, they who had experienced WWII taught me more than a history book ever could. As part of our trip we visited the camp at Dachau. It is a memory that will never leave me. It was so still, so reverent, so horrifying to walk the paths the prisoners walked, to look at the buildings, the crematoriums, the wrought iron gate that read “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes you free). We read the testimonials and looked at the photos, we were there for hours, paying our respects. Everyone should bear witness to what happened at those camps in the hopes that we can someday prevent man's atrocity to man.

[george389]

11:19 PM on 06/24/2009

well said

[MyNameIsJames]

04:19 PM on 06/05/2009

How can President Obama preach this When he is in the process of hiding from war crimes in this nation.

I wish there was one member of the press who would challenge this statement with his statements of "looking forward not backward" when it comes to the issue of torture - what a load!

Its easy to talk tough about essentially a meaningless point - Ahmendinejad acknowledging the Holocaust. He may not even be President after Iran's next election.

How about using that tough "cowboy talk" against those who violated the Geneva
Conventions at Gitmo, in Iraq, and Afghanistan?

Give me a break Mr. President - show some spine -right here in your own country!

The President reminds me of the 5th grader who runs away from the school bully (Cheney/Bush) on the playground, only to find a kindergartner (Ahmadinejad) and then proceeds to pick- on kindergartner. Way to get the low hanging fruit - tough guy!

[listen2elvis]

08:10 PM on 06/09/2009

Glad I'm not the only one saying this kind of stuff. Thank you.

[Chopin]

04:14 PM on 06/05/2009

I can't believe Huffpost is losing control over its imflammatory headlines: "Obama Dares Ahmadinejad to Visit Nazi Camp" I can believe Murdoch's yellow journals or FoxNews doing that.

President Obama did NO SUCH THING! An immature egotistical macho cowboy does that --- ("Bring it on"), not this seasoned, thoughtful and wise president. He said, "He (Ahmadinejad) should make his own visit (to the Buchenwald concentraion camps) . . .", very matter-of-factly, very even-temperly, in Tom Brokaw's interview. That's the difference. Huffpost should take real care not to lose sight of that important difference in careless sloppy headlines.

[BennyW]

04:14 PM on 06/05/2009

Might be educational to visit Guantanamo also.... get a first hand view

[greatscot]

04:11 PM on 06/05/2009

Intersting that Obama was speaking in Dresden, - a city that was the first to be introduced to the experience of the firestorm, where the very oxygen in the air is consumed so that people die of asphyxiation before being burned to a crisp. More than 80,000 completely innocent German civilians were killed in the Dresden bombing over a period of 2 DAYS! Perhaps a word might have been said on their behalf? Obama is being very selective in his speeches too, the Arabs are supposed to "forget the past", but the Jews are never to forget the past, according to him. Well, NOBODY should forget the past, because when we do that, we repeat it. Who is advising Obama on this trip? Are they like Bush's last spokesperson ( I think her name was Dana Perino, or something like that) who had never heard of the Cuban Missile crisis - didn't know what it was! Ignorance of history appears to be rampant. in this administration, as in the last.

[BennyW]

04:04 PM on 06/05/2009

Gaza---- next stop should be Gaza---