Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer on Monday night condemned former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s (R) “outrageous comments” comparing the Iran nuclear deal to the Holocaust and said that Huckabee’s statements reminded him of the “incitement” that led to the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“There are serious issues to be debated here but for anybody to equate what the president’s doing to what Adolph Hitler did in World War II is just extraordinary. And in some ways it’s a form of incitement, and we’ve seen the results of that 20 years ago in Israel. There was the same kind of incitement against Yitzhak Rabin and that led to a tragic outcome,” Kurtzer, who served as ambassador under President George W. Bush, said on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes.”
“I just hope that people really stand back and understand that Mr. Huckabee has crossed a very serious line here,” he continued. “Every Republican candidate should stand up, condemn this and ask him to retract it.”
Rabin was assassinated in 1995 after he helped broker the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine.
Despite strong condemnations of his remarks, Huchabee has refused to apologize for or back down from comments he made about the Iran nuclear deal on Saturday.
“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. 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 said on Saturday in an interview with Breitbart News.
Watch Kurtzer’s interview with Chris Hayes at MSNBC.
