Huck and the Hornet's Nest

I had MSNBC's Morning Joe on the television yesterday morning and listened dumbfounded as the group around the table took turns flagellating Mike Huckabee in absentia for having stated the obvious about the Iran nuclear deal and, worse, refusing to perform penance by apologizing. What Huckabee said the other day that earned him the opprobrium of the Morning Joe crowd was this:

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. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.

Almost everyone from President Obama on down has reacted to this statement as if Huckabee were the dentist who had just shot Cecil. Most of his critics jumped on the third sentence in the quote above which claimed that Obama was, in effect, preparing the ground for another Holocaust.

Granted the metaphor is unkind to Mr. Obama, and perhaps even unfair, but maybe not.

The issue in question is whether the practical effect of the president's deal is to enable Iran to make good on the threats and execrations it has been pronouncing on Israel ever since the Ayatollahs came to power in the 1970's. If it is, and many critics believe it is, then the comparison to the Holocaust is certainly apt.

As David French at National Review Online observes:

How many times do Iranian officials and Iranian allies have to express genocidal intentions before we believe them? While there’s long been argument as to whether former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually said Israel “must be wiped off the map,” there is an enormous amount of evidence that this sentiment has been repeated (even stated in English) and amplified by Iranian officials and allies on multiple occasions.

For example, the inscription below (on a missile, no less) has been translated as saying “Israel must be uprooted and wiped off [the pages of] history.”

And in the banner below, the Iranians helpfully provided their own translation:

You can see other images and translations in this excellent report from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Huckabee himself also tweeted other genocidal Iranian threats, including the Iranian Martyr Foundation’s threat “to replace Israel . . . with a big Holocaust.” Iran’s supreme leader has threatened to “raze” Israeli cities in the event of war, and Hezbollah’s leader has left no room for imagination, declaring “”If all the Jews gathered in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide. . . . It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.”

And if you think Hezbollah isn’t relevant to Iran’s plan, no lesser light than the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said, “In the near future, we will witness the destruction of the cancerous microbe Israel by the strong and capable hands of the nation of Hezbollah.” The examples could go on and on.

In other words, Iran has threatened Israel with genocide for years. If they obtain a nuclear weapon they'll finally have the means to bring about a thermonuclear holocaust and fulfill their dream of killing millions of Jews. The Obama deal seems designed to at best delay by a mere few years the production of such a weapon. So how, exactly, is Huckabee either wrong or irresponsible in calling our attention to what a nuclear Iran portends? I don't see it, but Mika Brzezinski sure does:

In case you didn't get it all here's the transcript. It's one long non-sequitur:

If you’ve been to Auschwitz, if you’ve been to Birkenau, if you’ve been to any of these places where people were killed, and you see the piles of glasses, the piles of hair, the piles of shoes, and the piles of clothes and every bit of their humanity that had to be stripped away, handed over, as they went and then burned to their deaths, among other things, it’s really not a good comment to say. It’s a deal breaker! It should be over for him. You don’t say that. And, by the way, if you said it by mistake, that’s a sign of who you really are.

It's hard to parse, in a charitable way, exactly what Ms Brzezinski's trying to say here, but she seems to be insisting that if you've seen the places where Jews were exterminated then you're a disgusting human being if you say that Iran wants to repeat the whole horrible process.

How her conclusion could possibly follow from its antecedents is beyond me, and why she displays so much self-righteous revulsion over someone making the common-sense claim that this deal will enable the Iranians to perpetrate another Holocaust of the Jews is a complete mystery as well. I wonder if even she knows why.

Semi-unrelated exit question: Why is there so much media outrage (and here) over the death of a lion, as awful as it is, and almost none in the liberal media, at least, over the videos showing Planned Parenthood selling baby body parts for profit? Just wondering.