Sec. of State John Kerry and other top ranking administration officials testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the nuclear deal reached earlier this month between Iran and the UN Security Council’s five permanent members—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany (known as P5+1), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P5%2B1 who’ve been working on this diplomatic effort since 2006. Kerry said that while Israel’s fears over the deal are understandable, he and the signers believe the deal actually makes Israel and the region safer.
While many are engaged in a reasoned debate over the deal, others are using it as an excuse for political grandstanding. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, for instance, seems to have torn a page from publicity hound Donald Trump’s poll-spiking, over-the-top playbook and commented on the deal—to almost universal condemnation.
“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history,” Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Fox News contributor, told Breitbart on Saturday. “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.”
Huckabee’s reference to the Holocaust provoked criticism from President Obama in Africa, several American Jewish organizations, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer, and Republican primary opponent, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush who said on Monday: “The Iran deal is horrific…but I think we need to tone down the rhetoric, for sure. The use of that kind of language, it’s just wrong.”
Fred Karger, the openly gay, Jewish, former 2012 Republican presidential candidate, also reacted strongly.
“No matter what you think of the nuclear deal with Iran, Mike Huckabee crossed the line by comparing it to the Holocaust. Huckabee will say anything to try and stay relevant while he also tries to divert attention away from the host of problems he faces in his campaign for president,” Karger said in an email. Karger has created a SuperPAC to look into Huckabee’s campaign and character.
Trump’s camp does not find the reference offensive and other GOP pundits have suggested that the Iran nuclear weapons deal looks much like Britain’s Prime Minister bowing to Adolf Hitler just before World War II. Instead of apologizing, Huckabee has doubled down.
“It’s Neville Chamberlain all over again,” Huckabee said on Fox News’s The Five on Monday. “We’re gonna just trust that everyone’s gonna do the right thing. Three times I’ve been to Auschwitz. When I talked about the oven door, I have stood at that oven door. I know exactly what it looks like.”
Huckabee entitlement to co-opt the Holocaust comes from his many years as a tour guide to Israel with the “Israel Experience With Mike Huckabee”—a favorite with evangelical Christians awaiting Armageddon. (See promo video here).
Indeed, when Huckabee, a Baptist minister with a message of economic populism, ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, six in ten Iowa caucus-goers identified as “evangelical Christians” and Huckabee won a whopping 46 percent of their votes, according to the Washington Post.
Huckabee also delivers video messages to evangelical (and anti-gay) groups from Israel where he promises to be a good Christian soldier, if given the chance.
“I stand here on Mt. Carmel today and I hope, if called upon, I would be willing to stand all by myself but to call fire from heaven and to believe that God will answer – even if there are hundreds and hundreds of false prophets on the other side. God plus one is still a majority,” Huckabee said to the Pastors Network.
In 1960, when Sen. John F. Kennedy was running for president, he gave a speech to Greater Houston Ministerial Association on the separation of Church and State, saying he would not take orders from the Vatican as a practicing Catholic. Ironically, 55 years later Baptist minister Mike Huckabee is pledging to listen to God and not the “false prophets” if he is elected president—which begs the question of what he might do militarily to hasten Armageddon.
But Huckabee’s Christian warrior message can be confusing. For instance, Huckabee applauds anti-gay groups like the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group and declares that what the mainstream calls “hate speech” is actually truth.
“What kind of freedom of speech do we have if a person who expresses a biblical viewpoint about marriage is told they can’t open their businesses in a location?” he asked during a keynote address in 2013.
For an organization founded on anti-gay principles, Huckabee is not a half-bad choice for a featured speaker. In his time at Fox, the erstwhile politician has fear-mongered about non-discrimination ordinances, called the anti-gay hate group the Family Research Council (FRC) “one of the most respected family organizations in America,” and compared same-sex marriage to slavery. Back when he was seeking elected office, he endorsed the quarantining of AIDS patients. Oh, and one of the reasons he’s cited for opposing marriage equality? “The ick factor.”
In A. J. Jacob’s profile of Huckabee for Esquire, Huckabee employs the usual tactics of fear-monger: “The problem with changing the definition of marriage is that once you cross that line, then there’s no stopping,” he explains.
But Huckabee has crossed the line of good taste and polite sensitivity many times: he supported Josh Dugger after allegations surfaced that Josh molested several underage girls, including two sisters and in response to the transgender movement and the so-called “bathroom bills,” Huckabee joked that he wished he could have been identified as a girl when he was in high school so he could use the girl’s bathroom.
But in light of his comments about having been to Auschwitz as a tourist—ÆI have stood at that oven door. I know exactly what it looks like.”—it is perhaps useful to consider Huckabee’s support for Mel Gibson, whom Huckabee thinks should be forgiven for what many perceived as anti-Semitic comments and attitudes, which Gibson may have inherited from his father, a religious zealot who said the Holocaust never happened.
But Huckabee is a huge fan of Gibson’s controversial, very bloody 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ, lauding the film’s box office on his Facebook page in 2013 and decrying Hollywood’s failure to make more Bible-based films.
In March 2014, Huckabee said it’s about time to forgive Gibson.
Will Hollywood ever forgive Mel Gibson? The Deadline Hollywood website has published a remarkable essay arguing that it should. On the 10th anniversary of the release of Gibson’s mega-hit, “The Passion of the Christ,” show business journalist Alison Hope Weiner argues that it’s time to take Mel Gibson off the studios’ unofficial blacklist. She admits that she had the same image of Gibson that many did after his DUI arrest and his ugly breakup with his ex-girlfriend. Like most showbiz journalists, she assumed he was a racist, sexist, homophobic bully and anti-Semite. And she wrote stories that perpetuated that image. But then, something unusual happened. She got to know him personally. They became friendly. He met her family. And she discovered that none of what she believed about him was true.
She says Gibson went through a very bad period because of a drinking problem, but he’s actually a smart, kind, decent person who’s since made a sincere effort to atone for his transgressions. He’s also quietly given millions of dollars to Jewish charities, and not just to polish his image, because nobody knew about it. That realization made her consider that just maybe, our media also bear some responsibility for accepting celebrities’ public images as reality and just hammering away until people’s lives and reputations are destroyed. It’s debatable whether her essay will convince Hollywood to take Mel Gibson back. But if it makes reporters – and readers – of gossip sites think twice before they believe the cartoon images of people that the media peddle, then it’s well worth reading.
While Huckabee slams the media for making Gibson a pariah and accepting the actor’s alleged transformation as the Deadline Hollywood writer did, it is Huckabee—the presidential candidate who has seen “the door of the oven”—who fails to understand that Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is controversial precisely for its dangerous depiction of Jews. Here’s an excerpt from one Jewish review:
“For Jews who have used this movie to confirm their conviction that Christians will always hate Jews, Gibson has perpetrated an unforgivable crime that negates one of the most remarkable acts of communal religious repentance in history. The Second Vatican Council acknowledged the sin of the Church for almost 2000 years in blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus. Neither the Jews of that generation or of those to come, they decreed, bear any guilt for deicide. In 1988, the Vatican published Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion, with a list of nine points that any future depictions of Passion Plays are to use as guides. Gibson’s movie ignores every one of them.
To blame “the goyim” instead of Gibson is for Jews to ignore progress of incredible import in interfaith relations. Pope John Paul II just welcomed the Chief Rabbi of Israel as “my older brother.” He has condemned anti-Semitism as “a sin not only against the Church but against mankind.” We are no longer in the age of Christian-approved pogroms or Crusades and we dare not let a “Mel”-evolent lie blind us to a theological turning point of history.
The Passion” is a movie that ought to give pause to Christians not only because it is unfaithful to Church doctrine. It is pornography that asks to be accepted as inspiration; it is violence in the misplaced service of veneration and love; it is the message of Jesus summarized not by the teachings of his life but by the horrors of his death. As Peter Rainer put it so well, “The real damage will not, I think, be in the realm of Jewish-Christian relations, at least not in this country. Anti-Semites don’t need an excuse to be anti-Semites. The damage will be to those who come to believe that Gibson’s crimson tide, with its jacked-up excruciations, is synonymous with true religious feeling.”
This is the true offense about the “door of the oven” comment: Christian extremist Mike Huckabee believes he has the right to talk about the Holocaust while passionately loving a film that portrayed Jews as Hitler and his Nazi Party saw them.
How will Huckabee double down on that?