Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee returned fire Monday after President Barack Obama slammed Huckabee’s comments about the Iran deal as “ridiculous” and “sad.”
Huckabee on Saturday accused Obama of marching the Israelis “to the door of the oven” in forging the nuclear deal with Iran.
“What’s ‘ridiculous and sad’ is that President Obama does not take Iran’s repeated threats seriously. For decades, Iranian leaders have pledged to ‘destroy,’ ‘annihilate,’ and ‘wipe Israel off the map’ with a ‘big Holocaust,'” Huckabee said in a statement Monday. “‘Never again’ will be the policy of my administration and I will stand with our ally Israel to prevent the terrorists in Tehran from achieving their own stated goal of another Holocaust.”
The heated rhetoric comes as the first Republican primary debate nears and Huckabee and his 15 other GOP candidates for president jockey for the spotlight to ensure they are among the top 10 featured on stage for the main event.
That’s because the debate will look at the top 10 candidates leading in the polls — figures that could quickly shift as those below the top 4 are mere points apart from each other.
Huckabee’s remarks drew swift condemnation from top Jewish leaders, including the heads of anti-Semitism and anti-racism watchdogs like the the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Anti-Defamation League and
“To hear Mr. Huckabee invoke the Holocaust when America is Israel’s greatest ally and when Israel is a strong nation capable of defending itself is disheartening,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the latter group.
However, Huckabee has repeatedly slammed the Iran deal as dangerous for the U.S. and Israel since even before the deal was forged.
And he hasn’t strayed from controversial rhetoric in doing so.
Huckabee drew on a widely-repudiated ad from five decades ago to slam the Iran deal, posting an ad online slamming the Iran deal that raised the prospects of a nuclear bomb explosion. The ad included footage from the infamous “Daisy” ad from 1964, depicting a little girl picking petals off a daisy before a nuclear bomb explodes on screen.