Obama calls for new effort for 2-state solution

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-06-05 21:56

US President Barack Obama is given a tour of the Great Pyramids of Giza by the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass (not in picture) while in Cairo, Egypt June 4, 2009. [Agencies]

It was a pointed message to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has expressed doubts that 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis and who has urged that Israel be wiped from the map.

"He should make his own visit" to Buchenwald, Obama told NBC in an interview Friday. He added: "I have no patience for people who would deny history."

Earlier, the president told reporters: "The international community has an obligation, even when it's inconvenient, to act when genocide is occurring."

Obama is the first US president to visit Buchenwald, and the stop was personal. A great-uncle helped liberate a nearby satellite camp, Ohrdruf, in early April 1945 just days before other US Army units overran Buchenwald.

Ohrdruf no longer stands. But Buchenwald's main gate, crematorium, hospital and two guard towers have been kept as a memorial.

Accompanying Obama to the site was Elie Wiesel, a 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, author and Holocaust survivor.

Following the tour, Obama was flying to Landstuhl medical hospital for private visits with US troops recovering from wounds sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And he was ending the day in Paris -- reuniting with his wife, Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha, who planned a brief holiday in the City of Light after commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Allies' D-Day invasion in France.

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