Assault and Retreat

President Barack Obama is in a very hard place. He must be seen to be doing something. Apart from grandiloquent speeches and his offering of himself, his personal prestige and power as president of the United States as a guarantor of success in establishing understanding between the world of Islam and that of Christianity, he really is merely a single voice. Those who believe in him and respect him as a man of goodwill are ready to accept his sincerity and his commitment to peace.

Those who disdain the office he represents, hate the country he is head of, and who have no regard for him personally, are more than prepared to condemn him for interference in affairs of the Muslim world. Just as Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the very cleric of highest standing in the world of Shia Islam supportive of Iran's Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad complacently responds to Mr. Obama's overtures that Muslims detest the United States and always will.

Mr. Obama stood forthrightly clear-minded (only minimally sacrificing himself ethically on the matter of Israeli intransigence and Palestinian innocent-needfulness) in Cairo - once the major influence of the Islamic world - to place his influence before his listeners heralding the potential for a new opportunity for Islam and Christianity to recognize one another. As someone whose heritage crosses over into both worlds his assertions have resonance. But only for those willing to give him the balance of trust.

It some ways when he addressed his world-wide audience through the closer Egyptian audience he appeared prepared to sacrifice Israel's future by demanding of it what it had already proffered in the search for peace, without acknowledging that those with whom Israel bargains represent the deliberately failed partnership. He did his best to appear fair and balanced in his presentation. He appears almost messianic, as though he half believes in a divine mission, himself an expositor of faith divine.

And then he transformed himself into a penitent, grieving for the universal sin of humankind's racism. Appearing in Germany, the most powerful man on Earth whose own forbears knew the indelible savagery of racial discrimination and violence against mass humanity paid homage to the people singled out as mass victims in the world's single most horrendous event of genocidal intent. A tour of guard towers, barracks that held emaciated humans en route to the crematoria is a lesson in humility.

As the first U.S. president to visit Buchenwald, one of the few Nazi-era concentration camps in Germany itself, he spoke movingly of the viciousness of Holocaust denial and the incendiary hatred that motivates it. "This place is the ultimate rebuke of (Holocaust denial) those thoughts - a reminder of our duty to confront those who tell lies about our history. These sites have not lost their horror with the passage of time."