On Saturday, former Arkansas governor and 2016 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, appearing on Breitbart News Saturday, blasted President Obama’s Iran deal in brutal language.
Calling Obama’s foreign policy “the most feckless in American history,” he added: “It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.”
Huckabee’s implicit reference to the Holocaust – and his statement that President Obama’s Iran deal facilitates a second Holocaust – has driven typical faux outrage from the same left that labeled President Bush a genocidal maniac and labels modern Republicans warmongers who embrace nuclear annihilation. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, a woman who accused Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker of giving women “the back of his hand… grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back,” slammed Huckabee: “This rhetoric, while commonplace in today’s Republican presidential primary, has no place in American politics.” President Obama, the same man who has stated that Republicans seek to deprive the poor of healthcare, said that Huckabee’s statements were “part of a general pattern that would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad. Presidential debates deserve better.”
Unsurprisingly, the leftist Anti-Defamation League, an organization which has backed President Obama’s executive amnesty and the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage, criticized Huckabee too: “Whatever one’s views of the nuclear agreement with Iran – and we have been critical of it, noting that there are serious unanswered questions that need to be addressed – comments such as those by Mike Huckabee suggesting the president is leading Israel to another Holocaust are completely out of line and unacceptable.” The ADL questions the Iran deal, but as a pro-Democrat organization, continues to maintain that President Obama is pro-Israel despite zero evidence to that effect.
So, were Huckabee’s comments “appropriate”?
Of course they were. They were also factually correct.
Questions of appropriateness routinely ignore the history of both presidential politics and politics in general. In 1964, LBJ infamously accused Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater of facilitating a nuclear holocaust against American children. In 2012, Vice President Joe Biden accused Mitt Romney of wanting to put black people “back in chains.” The Obama campaign accused Mitt Romney of having a man fired, destroying health insurance for both him and his wife, and leaving his wife insuranceless while dying of cancer.
And when it comes to this Iran deal, it is the height of hypocrisy for President Obama to complain about overheated language. He has routinely stated that the only alternative to his disastrous surrender is war, presumably of the nuclear variety: “Without a deal, we risk even more war in the Middle East… Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war. Those are the options.”
Last Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who once said American soldiers razed Vietnamese villages “in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan” while taping electrodes to genitals and cutting off ears and heads, said that for Republicans, the only alternative solution was to “totally go to war.”
That’s patently untrue, but no one seems to find such comments inappropriate. President Obama plays defense for Iran by ripping his domestic political opponents as warmongers, and the media find this entirely unobjectionable. Mike Huckabee rightly labels Obama’s Iran policy a facilitator of potential genocide, and the media go insane.
And Huckabee is right. He didn’t say that Obama is forcibly shoving Jews into ovens. He said that the Obama administration has brought the Israelis to the brink of a second Holocaust, that the Obama administration is complicit in the Iranian desire to achieve that second Holocaust. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agrees. In April, he spoke at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and said:
Democracies cannot turn their eyes away from the dictatorships of the world that seek to spread their influence… ahead of World War II, the world attempted to appease the Nazis. They wanted quiet at any price, and the terrible price did come… Just as the Nazis aspired to crush civilization and to establish a ‘master race’ as ruler of the world while annihilating the Jewish people, so too does Iran strive to gain control over the region and then spread further, with the explicit intent of obliterating the Jewish state.
The head of Israel’s leftist opposition Labor Party, Isaac Herzog — a man backed by President Obama over Netanyahu in the last Israeli election — said that the Iran deal will “unleash a lion from the cage, it will have a direct influence over the balance of power in our region, it’s going to affect our borders, and it will affect the safety of my children.”
It is impossible not to connect current Western actions with the actions of the West in the run-up to the Holocaust. Like Nazi Germany, modern Iran has declared its intent to wipe Jews from the Middle East, vowing genocidal war. Like Nazi Germany, Iran has maximized its regional power by conquering its neighbors, from Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and Yemen. Like Nazi Germany, Iran has translated its aggression into concessions from the West, while claiming that this time, it will restrain itself.
Unlike Nazi Germany, the Iranians face no threat of war for further regional aggression. Unlike Nazi Germany, the Iranians face no Churchill, no FDR. Unlike Nazi Germany, the Iranians have a clear playing field with the full approval of Western powers. And President Obama isn’t facilitating the march of Jews to the ovens, as many Germans did in World War II, because he’s being forced to do so at point of gun. He’s the most powerful man on earth, in charge of the most powerful military in world history. And he’s helping out an Iranian regime hell-bent on destroying Jews worldwide and conquering its neighbors. The Iran deal isn’t Munich. It’s Appomattox Courthouse for the West.
Huckabee’s comments will provide a useful litmus test to the Republican field. Many members of the Republican Party seem to believe that inaccurately temperate language with regard to the Iran deal represents good strategy. 2016 candidate Governor Jeb Bush (R-FL), for example, recently took Scott Walker to task for stating he would revoke the Iran nuclear deal on his first day in office:
At 12:01 on January, whatever it is, 19th [2017], I will not probably have a confirmed secretary of state; I will not have a confirmed national security team in place; I will not have consulted with our allies. I will not have had the intelligence briefings to have made a decision. If you’re running for president, I think it’s important to be mature and thoughtful about this.
Huckabee isn’t backing down: he’s been tweeting out direct quotes from Ayatollah Khamenei illustrating Khamenei’s genocidal intent. The Obama administration and its media allies, meanwhile, target Huckabee in their perennial search for Republican “overreach.” They forget one thing: when it comes to a deal this bad, the only overreach is signing it, celebrating it, and championing the facilitation of genocide and regional war as a presidential legacy of triumph.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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