(JTA) — Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, talking about the Iran nuclear deal, said President Barack Obama will march Israelis “to the door of the oven.”
Huckabee, in an interview Saturday with Breitbart News, evoked Holocaust images of the ovens used to dispose of the bodies of Jews gassed in Nazi concentration camps.
“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history,” the former Arkansas governor said. “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.”
Calling the deal signed earlier this month by Iran and world powers the “most idiotic thing,” Huckabee said the agreement should be rejected by Democrats and Republicans in Congress, “and by the American people.”
“I read the whole deal,” he said. “We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.”
The Democratic National Committee took issue with Huckabee’s analogy to the Holocaust, saying such rhetoric “has no place in American politics.”
“Cavalier analogies to the Holocaust are unacceptable,” said the DNC’s chair, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, in a statement issued Sunday. “Mike Huckabee must apologize to the Jewish community and to the American people for this grossly irresponsible statement.”
In May, when Huckabee announced he was running for the 2016 presidency, he cast Obama’s foreign policy as not sufficiently protective of Israel’s interests.
“Hell will freeze over before they get a nuclear weapon,” Huckabee said of Iran.
A pastor, Huckabee visits Israel three to four times a year and leads tours there for evangelical Christians.
