Israel v. Barbarism: No moral equivalence

A folksy Mike Huckabee told several hundred enthusiastic supporters of the State of Israel on Sunday that the Jewish state has an “absolute right to exist as a secure, free and unfettered nation” because Jews “own the land according to G-d’s deed from the Bible.”

Huckabee, a past and present Republican presidential hopeful, delivered the keynote address at the thirty-second annual gala of the American Friends of Bet El, at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan.

A Baptist minister who hosts “Huckabee” on the FoxNews cable channel, he preached to the converted as he restated his broad support for the expansion of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, an activity that has been strongly criticized by the Obama administraiton. Bet El is a community founded in 1977 on a mountain in Samaria near Ramallah. It is now home to 1,300 families.

“Our government should be encouraging Israel to build as many bedrooms as can be, in Samaria, Judea and throughout the land of Israel — and especially in the capital of Israel, in Jerusalem.”

Huckabee said that he is “outraged that Israel has been given a sense of moral equivocation with the likes of the terrorists of Hamas.”

“When Hamas was sending rockets by the thousands indiscriminately into civilian targets in Israel, there were people in the American government that had the audacity to suggest that maybe there wouldn’t be rocket launches if Israel would just abdicate its sovereign right to the land that G-d gave them,” he said.

“There is no moral eqivalency between terrorism and the free state of the nation of Israel. One is evil and one is good. One represents civilization and the other represents barbarism.”

Huckabee has been to Israel over 30 times, often leading tour groups. He recounted that he would sometimes stop in a Palestinian shop and pick up a map, pointing out to his group that Israel is not labeled on the map.

“Palestinians continue to deny even the existence of Israel and continue to teach in their schools that the Jews are targets for murder,” he said.