Huckabee’s ‘oven door’ comment outrageous

By Rabbi Ben Kamin

Rabbi Ben Kamin
Rabbi Ben Kamin

ENCINITAS, California — Gov. Mike Huckabee, presidential candidate, preacher, and talk show host, seems to believe that he has special access to Jewish historical pain.   Yet what he uttered about the dubious nuclear deal with Iran served only to Trump his own calibrations about how to get some attention.

Huckabee’s utterance, now well examined and generally dismissed, was that President Barack Obama will ultimately “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”  Were there such a thing as freedom of the press in Iran, we would have read and heard a lot of acclamation over there for this completely gratuitous and feckless bit of political grandstanding.

Huckabee serviced authorized Iranian aspirations well with this balderdash.   The jihadist regime has indeed boasted for decades its official position that it fully intends to wipe the Jewish state off the map—ostensibly with an atomic weapon.  But the former governor managed to enlarge the Iranian threat while he completely trivialized what actually did happen 70 years ago at “the door of the oven.”

Six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were systemically gassed, shot, vaporized, and burned in the Nazi-led European genocide that occurred between 1933 and 1945 (mostly after the 1942 and the formally sanctioned “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”)   It’s urgently important to record that an additional 5-6 million innocents, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, the mentally and physically handicapped, innumerable “Righteous Gentiles” who tried to protect Jews, Russian POWs, and a bevy of other “undesirables” and anti-fascists were also thrown into the oven of the Nazi inferno.

Where does Mike Huckabee, in his folksy Arkansas world-view, get the notion that he can make an analogy between a paper deal that has yet to be ratified and the most horrifically racialist continental pogrom in history?   Does he not even think about the fact that the State of Israel, which he claims to defend, by its very commanding existence, is the difference between 1942 and 2015?  Does he not even think, generally?

At best, Huckabee is drawing from his evangelical melodrama that requires the Jewish state to exist only until it vanishes—not from Iranian intransigence but from apocalyptic formulas that will then trigger the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.  At worst, his remarks were utterly self-serving and cynical and only diminished the staggering truth of the Holocaust—which we all are still calibrating numerically and emotionally.

Huckabee claims he knows all about this stuff because he’s been to Auschwitz several times and actually stood at the door of the oven.  That does not make him a witness and does not make him a Jew.  When he opens his mouth and co-opts this incomprehensible tragedy, he simply becomes a thief.

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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer.  You may comment to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com

 

1 thought on “Huckabee’s ‘oven door’ comment outrageous”

  1. I am very disappointed in Mr Kamin’s comments. I don’t see him speaking with same kind of passion against the Iran deal or Obama. Mike Huckabee is giving a strong warning of what could happen and as strong as Israel is one dirty bomb would wipe out much if not all the country. In addition America is under grave threat from the missiles and terrorists that could bring a bomb to America too. I was happy to see the Governor speak out so strongly and wish more people would.

    Kamin’s last comment about Huckabee becoming a thief is deplorable. Kamin is an ostrich with his head in the ground. It seems to me that the Governor cares more about Jewish people’s welfare than Kamin does.

    –Charles Wax, San Diego

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