Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who recently returned from a trip to Israel, tells Newsmax that the Israelis feel “on their own” and no longer can rely on the United States under President Barack Obama.
The 2008 Republican presidential candidate also says the Obama administration has mismanaged its response to the turmoil in the Middle East and has treated adversary Iran better than longtime ally Egypt.
Huckabee hosts a talk show on the Fox News Channel, “Huckabee,” and his latest book is the just-released “A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need from Washington (and a Trillion That We Don't!).”
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In the third part of his wide-ranging exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV, Huckabee — considered a strong candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 — discussed how he would deal with radical Islam if he were president.
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“What I wish the United States would do first is just say openly, publicly, without apology — despite the fact that it’s politically incorrect — that Islamic jihadism is a clear and present danger to every person’s freedom on the planet who does not subscribe to radical Islam,” Huckabee says. “Because it is.”
The idea that America can coexist with radical Islam, he adds, is “utter naïve nonsense, because their goal is the annihilation of all the infidels, including all the Muslims who don’t adhere to their radical view of shariah law and to the establishment of a caliphate.”
Asked whether the Obama administration has done enough to deal with the outbreak of protests in the Middle East, Huckabee responds: “No. In fact, I think their problem is they don’t even know what’s going on.
“They had no intelligence whatsoever in Egypt to understand that that was coming. They were totally caught off guard.”
Furthermore, he says, “the way we mismanaged that is that we simply sent a message to all our allies in the Middle East, not just in the Middle East but everywhere, and here’s what it said: No matter how strong an ally you have been, if you get in trouble, you are so on your own, because we are immediately going to pick who we think is going to win and jump on their tank with them.”
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak “had been an ally for 30 years. He had kept the peace with Israel. Without praising him or trying to keep him in power, the president could have said this is a matter for the Egyptian people to determine. We respect their sovereignty as a nation, and if their people choose to depose their government, then we won’t interfere with that. But we certainly acknowledge the relationship we have had with President Mubarak and we are grateful that he has kept the peace.
“What [Obama] did by immediately calling for Mubarak’s ouster was something he never did for [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad during the uprising in 2009. We are essentially saying we treat our enemies better than we treat our friends. He never called for the ouster or the stepping down of Ahmadinejad, but on day one he’s calling for Mubarak to step down.”
Commenting on his recent trip to Israel, Huckabee tells Newsmax: “I’ve never seen the Israelis so guarded in terms of their optimism.
“I’ve been going to Israel since 1973 and I’ve seen a lot of changes in Israel. This was my 15th trip there, I think. I visited with many government officials on this trip — the prime minister, the defense minister — and I’ve never seen such a unanimous mood. The Israelis feel on their own. They feel like the United States of America under President Obama cannot be counted on to really step in for them at a crucial moment.”
The United States “has continued to say that building [settlements] in the Judea-Samaria area continues to be the biggest threat to resolving the Palestinian-Israeli crisis,” Huckabee says.
“And to that I say, nuts! That’s not what is the impediment. The impediment is that the Palestinians have never even acknowledged that Israel has a right to exist, and apart from some security fence would continue to send suicide bombers into Israeli neighborhoods.”
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