Obama Berlin Speech At Victory Column

Thank you to the citizens of Berlin and to the people of Germany. Let me thank Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier for welcoming me earlier today. Thank you Mayor Wowereit, the Berlin Senate, the police, and most of all thank you for this welcome.

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father – my grandfather – was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning – his dream – required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West. And so he wrote letter after letter to universities all across America until somebody, somewhere answered his prayer for a better life.

That is why I’m here. And you are here because you too know that yearning. This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. And you know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both of our nations came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life.

Ours is a partnership that truly began sixty years ago this summer, on the day when the first American plane touched down at Templehof.

VOA reports describing Obama's Berling Speach.

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is urging Europeans and Americans to work together to defeat terror and the extremism that supports it.

Speaking to a cheering crowd of tens of thousands in Berlin, Obama said there must be no walls dividing allies on either side of the Atlantic, or between religions and races. He then called on Europe to stand by the United States to bring stability to Afghanistan and to work to end the war in Iraq,

Obama also spoke of his vision of America, and how it drew his Kenyan father to its shores with ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people.

It was the candidate's first formal speech on an international tour that has taken him to Europe and the Middle East.

The Democratic candidate's tour and its news coverage have come under intense criticism from the campaign of his Republican rival, John McCain. The four-term U.S. senator in Ohio said he would "love to give a speech in Germany." But he said he would rather give it as president than as a candidate for the presidency. McCain's campaign Web site accuses the media of a "bizarre fascination" with Obama.

The Obama visit comes at the start of a European tour that will also take him to France and Britain. Obama earlier visited Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

He meets later Thursday with other German officials, Obama was also expected to address the issue of NATO troop needs in Afghanistan.