When President-elect Donald Trump chose former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel he produced "an amazing pick," Israeli special envoy Michal Cotler-Wunsh told Newsmax on Thursday.
Trump on Tuesday announced he will nominate Huckabee as ambassador and appoint Steven Witkoff as special envoy to the Middle East. The former and future president has promised to align U.S. foreign policy more closely with Israel's interests as it wages wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Cotler-Wunsh, Israel's special envoy for combating antisemitism, praised Trump's selection of Huckabee.
"First of all, it's not only an amazing pick for the state of Israel, I believe that it's an amazing pick for the United States of America," she told "Wake Up America" co-host Jon Glasgow. "I think that we're really at an intersection of an attack, not just on the state of Israel, and not just on Jews worldwide with a tsunami of antisemitism, but actually on our shared foundational values.
"And so the pick of Mike Huckabee, who has expressed not only his understanding of the struggles of the state of Israel, but actually, as they intersect with what ails democracies everywhere, is a very important one."
Cotler-Wunsh also said Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., Trump's pick for U.N. ambassador, is the right person for the job. She cited Stefanik's questioning during the House probe into antisemitism on college campuses.
"What Elise Stefanik exposed in that hearing is the obscene double standard in the application of principles of the universities … the failure of their presidents to unequivocally condemn not only [Hamas' attack on] Oct. 7, but those protests in their aftermath," the Israeli special envoy said.
"That is what Elise Stefanik exposed with regards to universities and the U.N. as the primary institution and all of its subsidiaries … UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration], UNIFIL [United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon], the many, many subsidiaries that have applied a consistent double standard to the state of Israel, the Jew among the nations, if you will.
"[She] is precisely the right person in the right place to expose and to combat and to defund what enables the continued antisemitism in those institutions that then fuels what happens on campuses, on streets, on social media, which is that tsunami of antisemitism."
Glasgow asked Cotler-Wunsh what she hopes for as the Biden administration gives way to the Trump administration.
"I think that the most important sort of paradigmal shift, which I would personally hope to see, and I was a member of the Parliament when the Abraham Accords passed, is actually represented in the Abraham Accords," Cotler-Wunsh said. "That is the most pivotal understanding that actually acknowledges that Iran, the Islamic regime of Iran, cannot be integrated into the region."
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Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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