WASHINGTON (JTA) — Mike Huckabee removed a statement from his website warning Israel and the Jews "not to insult" the friends they have.
The Anti-Defamation League on Monday had scolded the former Arkansas governor and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) for inappropriate use of Holocaust imagery to decry the debt crisis.
Both politicos, likely GOP presidential candidates in 2012, were reported over the weekend to have likened what they said was the U.S. government’s failure to address the debt to doing nothing as the Nazis carried out their genocide.
Huckabee said his comments, made in a speech in Pittsburgh to the National Rifle Association, were misconstrued.
His political action committee website called on the ADL and its director, Abraham Foxman, to apologize and added, according to multiple reports, "Israel and Jewish people need to make friends, not insult the ones they have."
By Wednesday, Foxman, in a letter to Huckabee posted on the ADL’s website, said he understood after speaking to Huckabee that he had "never intended to make any direct comparison between today’s issues and the Holocaust," although Foxman added that "Reasonable people, listening to the story of the words your daughter penned at Yad Vashem — ‘Why didn’t somebody do something?’ — followed by a reference to the national debt, could interpret that as drawing an analogy."
On Thursday, Huckabee’s demand for an apology — and his warning to Israel and the Jews — had disappeared from his website.
