Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee slammed New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “utterly ignorant” after she posted a Christmas message supporting Palestinian refugees by comparing their plight to Jesus Christ’s on Monday.
Ocasio-Cortez posted that in the story of Christmas, Christ “was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in a massacre of innocents.”
She then noted that “thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians, so much so that the Christian community in Bethlehem has canceled this year’s Christmas Eve celebrations out of both [fear for their] safety and respect.”
While AOC is no stranger to ruffling Republican feathers, Huckabee, who has regularly toured Israel as an outspoken supporter of the nation, was particularly riled up.
“This is a person who is utterly ignorant about what she’s talking about,” Huckabee told “Fox and Friends First” on Tuesday. “She may ought to stick to something she knows like bartending, because for gosh sake, she has no clue about the history of the Middle East, Jesus, the Jewish people, the state of Israel or virtually anything else she talked about in her post.”
Huckabee started his criticism of Ocasio-Cortez by asking whether or not she was “aware that Jesus was Jewish?” — a fact that the U.S. representative did indeed point out in her initial post.
In her original Instagram story, Ocasio-Cortez wrote, “This high Christian holiday is about honoring the precious sanctity of a family that, if the story were to unfold today, would be Jewish Palestinians.” The sentence was omitted from the Fox News segment and provided part of the basis for Huckabee’s outrage.
She also wrote: “The entire story of Christmas and Christ himself is about standing with the poor and powerless, the marginalized and maligned, the refugees and immigrants, the outcast and misunderstood without exception.”
The former governor went on to summarize his historical understanding of Palestine: “Is she not aware that the whole term ‘Palestinian’ meant ‘Jewish people’ until 1962 when Yasser Arafat co-opted the term and created a nation and made up a people and called them the Palestinians, who previously were Jordanian?”
While discussing Ocasio-Cortez’s point about Bethlehem canceling Christmas Eve festivities this year, Huckabee then revealed he has been going to Bethlehem since 1973.
“Back in the ’80s, up until then, 80% of the population of Bethlehem was Christian. Twenty percent was something else,” Huckabee said. “Now it’s 80% Muslim, and there’s only about 15% Christian because the Christians were pretty much burned out and shot down by the radical Muslims that took it over back during the intifada.”
Huckabee then spent the rest of the interview talking about his recent trip to war-torn Israel, a time he described as “one of the most sobering experiences I ever had in my life.”
Watch the full “Fox and Friends First” segment in the video above.
