This weekend, former Arkansas governor and flailing 2016 White House hopeful
Mike Huckabee shocked many with his slander that with the Iranian nuclear deal President Obama will "take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven." But while Americans should be disgusted, they shouldn't be surprised. After all,
like so many other Republicans, for years Mike Huckabee has been comparing abortion, the national debt and so much else he detests to the Holocaust.
First, Ronald Reagan came to the U.S. Treasury and tripled the national debt, but Mike Huckabee did not speak out. Then George W. Bush came and nearly the doubled the debt again, but Mike Huckabee said nothing. But when Barack Obama inherited the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, the Fox News host said never again:
Huckabee gave a speech to the National Rifle Association. He spoke of how, at Israel's Holocaust museum, he looked over his 11-year-old daughter's shoulder as she wrote in the guest book, "Why didn't somebody do something?" Then he said, "We cannot afford to be a generation that leaves our children with nothing but a huge debt and the very erosion of the freedoms that our founders and our fathers died and gave us so valiantly. And that's why I say, 'Let there never be a time in this country where some father has to look over his daughter's shoulder and see her ask this haunting question: Why didn't somebody do something?'"
Then as now, Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League were horrified. When Abraham Foxman of Anti-Defamation League decried his grotesque analogy as "highly inappropriate," Huckabee lashed out:
"Foxman's remarks are not only factually wrong, but they are hurtful to me personally in light of my unequalled friendship with members of the Jewish community, and I ask Foxman to retract his statement as publicly as he issued it, and apologize for his lack of accuracy in issuing it and for the harm done by attacking the very strongest advocates for the Jewish people and Israel."
Head below the fold for more on this story.
(Of course, with friends like Mike Huckabee, the Jewish people don't need enemies. After all, Mike Huckabee didn't merely vow to "take this nation back for Christ" and call for a faith-based Constitution that is "in God's standards." As it turns out, the former Baptist minister is at the forefront of the Christian Zionist movement dedicated to the mass conversion—and much larger slaughter—of world Jewry at Armageddon.)
Deficit spending isn't the only Shoah Mike Huckabee is worried about. Abortion, too, is YAH ("yet another Holocaust").
In 2011, Governor Huckabee joined the people behind Mississippi's failed "personhood" initiative which, among other things, distributed 600,000 DVDs declaring, "Saying it's OK to choose is the same thing as saying it's OK for Hitler to choose." Again, as Salon reported that year, the Holocaust analogy was one happily shared by some of the leading lights in the Republican Party:
Mike Huckabee, who supported Personhood USA's failed efforts in Mississippi, has often compared the Holocaust and abortion, saying of Nazi extermination, "educated scientists, sophisticated and cultured people looked the other way because they thought it didn't touch them." The day before Phil Bryant was elected governor of Mississippi -- at the same time the state's voters rejected the Personhood amendment -- he evoked the Jews of Nazi Germany "being marched into the oven," because of "the people who were in charge of the government at that time" as an argument to vote for it.
Now, Mike Huckabee has plenty of company
among the Shoah salesmen of the right. When it comes to Obamacare, the IRS, regulation of for-profit education companies, raising taxes on the wealthy, marriage equality and almost any policy they oppose, there is shortage of Republicans warning of Kristallnacht, box cars, Auschwitz and the ovens. As President Obama lamented:
"The particular comments of Mr. Huckabee are I think part of just a general pattern we've seen ... that would be considered ridiculous if it weren't so sad."
Sad, and counterproductive. While Mike Huckabee and his Republican fellow travelers are comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, surveys show that
most American Jews, like the
American people overall, support the Iran nuclear deal. And with their cheapening of the greatest conflagration ever visited upon any people in history, Mike Huckabee and his right-wing ilk are helping ensure that
Jewish voters remain Democratic.
