Huckabee: Obama is Marching Israelis to the Oven Door

The nuclear agreement the Obama administration has struck with the fundamentalist Islamic leaders of Iran could foment a second Holocaust, according to Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. On Saturday, Gov. Huckabee said that President Obama’s foreign policy is “so naive that he would trust the Iranians.” “By doing do, he would take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven,” he added. President Obama and Democratic Party leadership have tried to gin up controversy over the Holocaust reference. National Commiteee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz immediately pounced on the statement, demanding an apology. “This rhetoric, while commonplace in today’s Republican presidential primary, has no place in American politics,” she said. “Cavalier analogies to the Holocaust are unacceptable. Mike Huckabee must apologize to the Jewish community and to the American people for this grossly irresponsible statement.” President Obama chimed in that Huckabee’s remarks sounded like others made by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Sen. Tom Cotton — and that his view would be “ridiculous if it weren’t so sad.” “What’s ‘ridiculous and sad’ is that President Obama does not take Iran’s repeated threats seriously,” Huckabee responded today. “For decades, Iranian leaders have pledged to ‘destroy,’ annihilate,’ and ‘wipe Israel off the map’ with a ‘big Holocaust.’” In likening Iran to the Nazi regime, the former Arkansas governor joins another prominent critic of President Obama: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “As the Nazis strived to trample civilization and replace it with a ‘master race’ while destroying the Jewish people, so is Iran striving to take over the region and expand further with a declared goal of destroying the Jewish state,” Netanyahu said in April, on Holocaust Remembrance Day. “Instead of demanding Iran significantly dismantle its nuclear capabilities and conditioning lifting sanctions on it ending its aggressions, the world powers are retreating, leaving Iran with nuclear capabilities and even allowing it to expand them later on regardless to its actions in the Middle East and around the world.” The prime minister has lost no opportunity to say he views the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal as a global catastrophe. What does the deal have in common with the genocidal intentions of the Nazi regime, which wished to liquidate the global Jewish population by incineration? In 2002 the head of Hezbollah — the global terrorist organization funded, equipped, and trained by Iran — told a graduation ceremony, “If they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” (He also expressed concern that “several U.S. presidents are affiliated with the Christian Zionists.”) Iran’s terrorist arm would prefer a worldwide Final Solution, but it would undoubtedly take obliterating Israel as an acceptable first step. A nuclear strike would incinerate the population of Israel as surely as the cremtoria of days gone — but not forgotten. (The Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs, which this agreement puts Iran on the path to acquiring,  could strike the United States, as well.) Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated his intention to wipe the Israeli nation “off the map.” He also dedicated personal and governmental resources to Holocaust denial, claiming his promotion of such views “broke the spine of the Western capitalist regime.” Those are parallels that deserve at least as much concern and condemnation as Obama’s wounded feelings over the rhetoric of Messrs. Huckabee, Trump, Cotton, and Cruz. Ben Johnson is the former Managing Editor of FrontPageMag.com and author of Party of Defeat with David Horowitz.