Barack Obama Thursday challenged a new generation of Americans and Europeans to tear down walls between estranged allies, races, and faiths in a soaring call for global unity at an unprecedented mass campaign rally in Berlin.
The Democratic White House candidate told tens of thousands of people near the footprint of the old Berlin Wall that humanity faced a perilous turning point, and it was time to build "a world that stands as one."
The strikingly audacious speech, in a fevered atmosphere in Berlin's famed Tiergarten, took the White House race out of US borders in a way never seen before, and was designed to portray Obama as a leader with unique global appeal.
"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," he said, referring to festering divisions between Europe and the United States opened up by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
