Israel did not engineer migrant crisis at Ceuta, Spain-Morocco border, Huckabee tells Piers Morgan
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee dismissed conspiracy theories that claim Israel and the US are behind the migrant crisis at the Moroccan-Spanish border in Ceuta during an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan broadcast on Monday.
Morgan cited social media posts, including those circulated by Spanish Hollywood star Javier Bardem, which have blamed Israel for “weakening and destabilizing Spain” by weaponizing the “Western far Right to turn migration into a weapon against Muslims.”
“It sounds like Bardem needs to stick to reading a script that someone else wrote,” Huckabee retorted.
“It’s ridiculous to say that somehow this is a US-Israel conspiracy and that’s why all those young men flooded to the coast; it’s nonsense,” he added.
“Everything that seems to happen on earth, somebody has this nutty idea that it must be Israel and/or the US who would be behind it. Why don’t you just accept the fact that there were these people who were wanting to get to that part of Spain?” he asked.
Morgan cited Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, who said that Spain never missed an opportunity to lecture Israel, but needs to explain why it is maintaining colonial enclaves in Africa, asking if Huckabee agrees.
Answering affirmatively, Huckabee said he “thought it was a pretty good observation,” that raised “valid questions.”
Huckabee: Hamas are ‘proud terrorists’
Morgan and Huckabee also discussed other topics during their interview, including the process to disarm Hamas terrorists, and commenting on the interview Morgan had with Hamas spokesperson Ghazi Hamad, which preceded Huckabee’s interview within the same broadcast.
Morgan asked the ambassador if he thinks Israel can do a deal with Hamas, and if there is any point to which someone could trust the terror organization.
Hamas were “proud” of what they did during the October 7 massacre, highlighted by howthey “strapped GoPro cameras to their heads, and videotaped themselves raping, slaughtering, beheading, butchering, massacring women, children, and elderly people… they boasted about it online, in phone calls, on the video tape that they shot… so this guy [Hamad] has zero credibility,” Huckabee said.
“I think that’s very important to understand if there’s any way in which Hamas wants to make a deal, the first thing they have to do is what they said they were going to do last October, and that’s they’re going to disarm and demilitarize. They haven’t done it yet,” he added.
“So when they do, then we can take them a little more seriously. I hope they do. It would be a wonderful gift to the world if Hamas did not have weapons, because if they have them, they’re just nutty enough to want to use them to slaughter people, particularly civilians and innocent people,” he stated.
“They don’t need weapons. They need to disappear and go away,” he said.
Morgan then asked if, in a hypothetical scenario Hamas were to keep its word, could a circumstance exist where the US and Israel accept Hamas as the governing body in the Gaza Strip going forward?
“I don’t think so. The president [Donald Trump] has made it very clear. Regardless of what Israel would say, President Trump said repeatedly that Hamas has no future in Gaza. I think they forfeited the future,” he stated, adding that asking this would be like asking if it would be ok for the Nazis to continue to run Germany after World War II.
“What they should hope for is that they would be given some level of asylum that they could get out of Gaza, disappear, find some place to live anonymously in asylum. But the idea that they’re going to govern Gaza, I don’t think the people in Gaza would tolerate it, much less the US or Israel, or hopefully any other civilized country in the world,” he said.
Huckabee: If Trump resumes strikes on Iran, it will be an overwhelming attack
Morgan cited a conversation he had with Trump, who told the journalist that the president was “ready, locked, and loaded, to launch the biggest bombardment of Iran that the world had seen since World War II.”
Huckabee responded that everyone who works for Trump “trusts his instincts.”
“If, for whatever reason, in having talked to many people in the Gulf countries, and they urged him to give, as John Lennon would so brilliantly say, ‘give peace a chance,’ to give one more round of negotiations an opportunity, and he made that decision. So let’s see if it works. Let’s hope it does,” he added.
“But if it doesn’t, I think the president has also made it very clear that there is the military option, it’s on the table, and if he takes it, it’s not going to be a mild tap. It is going to be overwhelming,” he stated.
Huckabee denies Israel influenced Trump to strike Iran, insists Iran is threat within Western Hemisphere
Huckabee then denied the allegations that Trump’s decisions vis-a-vis striking Iran were guided by Israeli policy or requests from Israeli leadership.
“I was in the Situation Room… I disagree with any narrative that says that the Israelis talked Donald Trump into it. That simply did not happen. Nobody talked him into anything,” Huckabee said.
“The idea that the Israelis came in and sold him something is probably just one of the more preposterous things. It was based on the fact that for over 47 years, Iran has been saying death to America,” he added.
Iran’s goal is to “build a nuclear weapon,” with their first aim being to “destroy Israel,” Huckabee said, but he noted that this is just “the appetizer,” as “their goal is to annihilate America.”
“America is the entree,” he stated.
He also recalled memories of the Islamic revolutionaries storming the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, when “they frog-marched blindfolded embassy employees across the embassy grounds, held them hostage, 51 of them, for 444 days. I remember it quite well, and I remember the humiliation that we felt in America,” Huckabee said.
“I remember the chanting of death to America, the burning of our flags, and the threats that have never ceased, nor have they ever moderated,” he added.
Huckabee also noted how Iran’s threat is not just a Middle East issue, saying that the regime’s terror proxies are “already in the Western Hemisphere.”
“Hezbollah alone is in 12 Western Hemisphere countries. The idea that this is some unique Middle East issue, or it’s only an Iranian-Israeli issue, is utter nonsense,” Huckabee said.
“These people have ambitions, not necessarily to rule the world, but to destroy every part of it that does not agree with their radical Shia philosophy,” he added.
Huckabee concerned about global propaganda campaign spreading ‘demonstrably false’ perceptions of Israel, Jews
Morgan also asked Huckabee about perceptions of Israel, both within the US and on the global stage.
Morgan said that Israel’s global popularity has “plummeted” in the last two years, and that “nearly two-thirds of Americans have a negative view of Israel, [and] where half the country thinks [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu should be arrested when he comes to the US.”
The broadcaster asked if Huckabee was worried about these developments.
“It’s unfair, unfounded, it concerns me a great deal,” Huckabee responded.
“Obviously there’s an enormous propaganda campaign that is aimed against Israel, and against the Jewish people. And I think that’s really disturbing to me,” Huckabee added.
“They are up against a multi-billion dollar propaganda campaign, and a lot of money being spent in the US on university campuses, on social media, the bots are everywhere, painting a picture of the Jewish people as a whole, and the Israelis specifically, that is simply, absolutely, unfounded,” he continued.
“It is appalling to me, the reputation that has been thrust upon them, and it is ridiculously and horribly unfounded. I just want the truth to be told. Israelis aren’t perfect, Jewish people aren’t perfect, none of us are, but the blood libels that are thrown upon them should be really something that every civilized, every thoughtful, every intellectually capable person, every knowledgeable person would say, say what you wan about the Israelis, about the Jewish people, but these things that are being said, they’re just not true, and they’re demonstrably untrue,” Huckabee concluded.
