https://arab.news/g8wjn
A single interview with an American diplomat has triggered a furious joint statement from 14 states, most of them allies of the US. Is there a precedent for an interview of a sitting ambassador of any state that has created such shock waves? The online reaction was often hysterical.
If we live in an attention economy, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — an evangelical Baptist pastor and the US ambassador to Israel — has just scored big time, as has his interviewer, the right-wing conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson.
The core point in the two-and-a-half-hour interview came when Huckabee, a Donald Trump appointee, espoused the Christian Zionist view that Israel was entitled to all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, saying: “It would be fine if they took it all.” This is the classic religious extremist view that God made the Jews the chosen people and promised them, uniquely, the land.
Huckabee tried to excuse the view by claiming that the situation was not grave because, even though he believed that God did give the Jews, through Abraham, all that land in Genesis, chapter 15, Israel was not trying to take it. “They’re not trying to take over Jordan, they’re not trying to take over Syria, they’re not trying to take over Iraq or anywhere else,” he said.
