Obama at Buchenwald

last updated 8 January 2015

President Obama's latest push for Middle East peace, said Nicholas Kulish and Jeff Zeleny in The New York Times, came at the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp. The atrocities committed in Nazi Germany, Obama said, should serve as an eternal reminder to "be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time."

Obama's visit to Buchenwald was meant to hammer home one of the points of his closely watched speech in Cairo, said the AP's Gero Breloer in the Southern Ledger. Obama said that anyone who denies that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust is "ignorant" and "hateful." The message—especially to Israel's most vicious enemies—is that moving toward Middle East peace will take an honest reckoning with the past.

That's not what Obama's stop in Germany is about, said John Hinderaker in Power Line. The next stop on the president's itinerary after Buchenwald was Dresden, the scene of devastating Allied firebombing during World War II. It's ridiculous to juxtapose the scenes of such different types of violence, but it's part of an "apology tour" in which Obama never misses an opportunity to paint his own country as the bad guy.