WASHINGTON -- Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee met in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday during a break from the 2016 presidential campaign.
"It was great to visit with my friend Benjamin Netanyahu and so many other Israeli friends this week. I have known the Prime Minister for about 20 years and feel he is the Churchill in a world of Chamberlains," Huckabee said in a statement released by his campaign.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, a political action committee opposing Huckabee launched a website about inmate sentence commutations and pardons that the Republican issued while he was governor.
Huckabee met with members of the Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset, and held a fundraiser with Americans in Shilo, an Israeli-occupied settlement on the West Bank. The Obama administration considers the Israeli settlements illegal under international law.
At a news conference after his meeting with Netanyahu, Huckabee said he might not support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He pushed back against those who refer to the area as the West Bank or the occupied territory, instead using the Biblical names for the area.
"Israel has more of a connection to lands in Judea and Samaria -- specifically Shilo, where I was last night -- 3,500 years of connections to that very piece of property," The New York Times quoted him as saying at a news conference in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Jerusalem. "In America, we have about a 400-year relationship to Manhattan. It would be as if I came and said, 'We need to end our occupation of Manhattan.' I'm pretty sure most Americans would find that laughable."
Huckabee has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel and has visited the Middle Eastern country repeatedly since 1973. He is also a vocal critic of the nuclear arms deal with Iran that the United States and other world powers reached earlier this summer, and which Israel opposes.
"This toothless, embarrassing deal poses a direct threat to Israel, will trigger a nuclear arms race across the Middle East, and unleash a new wave of deadly Iranian-backed terrorism throughout the world. Their ultimate target, by their own admission, is the United States. It must be stopped," he said in a statement.
University of Arkansas at Fayetteville associate professor of political science Andrew Dowdle said Huckabee's trip, and his stance on the two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, could be a way for Huckabee to re-energize the evangelical base that supported his 2008 presidential bid.
"He has plenty of time to go back and campaign in those early states like Iowa, New Hampshire. At this point, considering how many people are spending time doing that, this is probably a better use of his time, in terms of high-profile overseas trips that end up helping," Dowdle said.
Huckabee has always supported Israel, said Hal Bass, a political science professor at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia.
"It's part and parcel to his political identity as a strong social conservative with connections to the religious right and a real connection, emotional as well as analytical connection, with the state of Israel," Bass said. "It's not some issue that he's embraced because some new consultant advised him to do it. This is deeply embedded in his political and religious identity."
Also Wednesday, the super political action committee Truth Squad 2016 started a website aimed at informing voters about Arkansas prisoners whose sentences Huckabee commuted.
The political action committee is led by 2012 presidential candidate and activist Fred Karger, and by Kim Renninger, whose husband -- Sgt. Mark Renninger -- and three other Lakewood, Wash., police officers were killed in November 2009 by former Arkansas inmate Maurice Clemmons.
In 2000, Huckabee had commuted Clemmons' sentence on burglary charges in Arkansas, making him eligible for parole. The state Parole Board received no objections during a public-comment period on his release and signed off on it.
Karger said Wednesday that voters should know about Clemmons and the more than 1,000 other inmates released when Huckabee either pardoned them or commuted their sentences.
"He never reached out to the families of the police officers," Karger said, adding that Huckabee had said "he would do it all over again if he had the same information."
"It's a character flaw personally," Karger said of Huckabee and reflects on "his judgment as chief executive, which I think that the voters need to be made aware of."
Huckabee's campaign spokesman Alice Stewart called the police officers' deaths an "absolute tragedy" but said Truth Squad 2016 is mischaracterizing the situation. She said the Parole Board members who approved the releases were appointed by Huckabee's Democratic predecessors, and Clemmons should have been re-incarcerated before the slayings because of a parole violation.
"SuperPACs are typically funded by powerful Washington and Wall Street elites and no one is a bigger threat to them than Gov. Huckabee, an outsider fighting for Main Street Americans. It's heartbreaking that these widows are being exploited for the political benefit of these secret-agenda-driven SuperPAC donors. This is Washington-DC-style, gutter politics at its worst," she said in a statement.
"If a group of Washington insiders think they can convince Republican primary voters that a southern Republican conservative governor, who oversaw the execution of 16 people -- the most in Arkansas history -- is somehow 'soft on crime,' they are sadly mistaken," her statement said.
The group's most recent report to the Federal Election Commission shows that it didn't raise any money in the first month it existed. Karger said he hopes to raise at least $1 million for television ads in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.
Working with George H.W. Bush's campaign, Karger helped develop the 1988 "Willie Horton" attack ad against then-Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis over a prison furlough program in Massachusetts that resulted in the release of convicted murderer Willie Horton, who committed two attacks while free. Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts at the time Horton was free.
Karger said he was inspired to create Truth Squad 2016 by an email from Renninger last fall about raising her son alone after the shooting that killed her husband.
"Those kinds of stories resonate so loudly because that's the personal side of this. Huckabee can be aloof and blame others and defend the reasons that he let him out ... but he needs to realize the personal side of his decision and be held accountable," Karger said.
Dowdle said he's not sure how much people remember about the case or whether it will influence voters if they are reminded of it.
"I don't think if you sit down the average person and said 'talk to me about Mike Huckabee' this would ever come up," he said. "Really this was kind of a nonstarter in the last contest, even in Arkansas."
Political opponents -- such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2008 -- have raised the matter of Huckabee's commutations and paroles in the past.
Bass said the commutations, and the subsequent criminal actions by some of those released prisoners, have been public knowledge for years, although they were only briefly touched on during Huckabee's 2008 presidential bid.
"His candidacy was, in many respects, so appealing to social conservatives and so appealing to the media and at the same time wasn't really threatening to [Sen. John] McCain's ultimate victory," Bass said. "So I just don't think he got the kind of scrutiny that a more competitive environment would present for him."
Bass said that having a group gear up opposition to Huckabee so early in the 2016 campaign is "almost flattering."
"If he weren't considered a competitive candidate, why would you invest the time and energy to knock him down?" Bass said.
Metro on 08/20/2015