Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee condemned Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Monday for using what sounded like a reference to the Holocaust to criticize the the Republican Party’s position on illegal immigration.
For Huckabee, it’s personal. In July, he defended himself from Clinton’s criticism for using Holocaust imagery to attack the White House’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Huckabee’s chance to get back at the former secretary of state came during an interview this week with Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg.
“I was making [a Holocaust reference] to the Iranian government, who had done two things: Denied the Holocaust existed, and then made the statement, ‘That we have delivery missiles that will take the Holocaust to the Jews,'” the former Arkansas governor explained on the show Monday, referring to when he said elsewhere that President Obama’s nuclear deal with Tehran would march Israel to the “oven door.”
Clinton was quick to criticize Huckabee, demanding that the 2016 GOP presidential candidate apologize for “unacceptable” choice of words.
The comments are “offensive and they have no place in our political dialogue. I’m disappointed and I’m really offended personally,” she said in July. “I know Governor Huckabee. I have a cordial relationship with him. He served as the governor of Arkansas. But I find this kind of inflammatory rhetoric totally unacceptable.”
The tables have turned, however, as it is Clinton who is now defending what many say is a clear allusion to the Holocaust.
In reference to the GOP’s efforts to tackle immigration reform, Clinton told reporters last week, “I know that there are some on the other side who are seriously advocating to deport 11-12 million people who are working here.”
She added that it was, “the height of irony that a party which espouses small government would want to unleash a massive law enforcement effort, including perhaps National Guard and others, to go and literally pull people out of their homes and their workplaces, round them up, put them, I don’t know, in buses, boxcars, in order to take them across our border.”
Many took Clinton’s comments to be a direct reference to when Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and shipped off in boxcars to concentration camps. The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate’s team denies Clinton meant to allude to this with her remarks on the GOP’s approach to illegal immigration.
Huckabee isn’t buying it, though, and he demanded that Clinton apologize both for her remarks, and for criticizing him in July for using similar imagery.
“I didn’t invoke something or invent it,” he said Monday. “And I’m wondering when Hillary is going to get up and apologize to me, publicly. She owes me one on this one.”
“Because if she’s going to criticize me for using a legitimate and an appropriate reference to the Holocaust, then she certainly ought to be called out or using, frankly, an incredibly inappropriate one regarding immigration,” he added.
