Huckabee’s "Oven" Attack On Obama Masks His Own Anti-Semitism

So far I have held back on commenting on Mike Huckabee's horrific claim the Barack Obama's Iran nuclear agreement "will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven."   But, given his refusal to apologize and walk back the statement - which seems aimed at cynically whipping up the Christofascist voters in the GOP base - a comment and condemnation seem in order.  As regular readers know, I believe that Huckabee is a despicable individual.  Hypocrite also needs to be added as a descriptive term of the man.  Like most of the far right Christofascists, when push comes to shove, Huckabee cares about Israel for one reason and one reason only: Israel is key in setting the stage for Armageddon and the supposed return of Christ.  

Of course, when Armageddon comes, most Jews will perish if one believes the allegedly inerrant Bible.   Thus, Huckabee actually doesn't care about the Israeli people.  He merely sees them as a means to bring about Armageddon.  With "friends" like Huckabee, Israel truly needs no enemies.   And as blogger friend Karen Ocamb points out, Huckabee supports a form of far right Christians who continue to support a view of Jews as "Christ-killers."  Here are excerpts from Karen's post on the issue:

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.”

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.

Huckabee [self-appointed] 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.

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. 

But in light of his comments about having been to Auschwitz as a tourist—I 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.

[I]t 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.

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.