Mike Huckabee bashes America on foreign soil

Mike Huckabee this week traveled to a foreign country and, speaking on foreign soil, is now bashing America in front of a foreign audience:

Former Arkansas governor and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee says the US has taken too harsh a stance against Israel on the issue of settlements.

Huckabee said Monday the US should not "be telling Jewish people in Israel where they should and should not live."

Huckabee made the comment Monday while visiting Jewish enclaves in east Jerusalem. Affiliated with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, Huckabee has been touted as a possible candidate in 2012.

According to Haaretz, Huckabee is joined on this trip by "prominent Jewish and Republican activists from the United States" and "is also planning to visit the Jewish section of Hebron, Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and Ma'aleh Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank." One of Huckabee's traveling companions, New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, says the purpose of the foreign trip is "to shine the spotlight on Obama's policy in Jerusalem, which has just been a horror."

Apparently, insisting that Israel stop occupying and building settlements in land that doesn't belong to it is "telling Jewish people where they should and should not live." Every country should invoke that standard -- Russia should have responded to American objections to its 2008 invasion of Georgia by insisting that the U.S. has no right to "tell Russians where they should and should not live." It was terrible how the U.S., opposed to Saddam's 1991 invasion of Kuwait, tried to tell Iraqis where they should and should not live. And immigration opponents in the U.S. should really stop telling Mexicans where they should and should not live.

Isn't there some righteous Washington prohibition on criticizing America's foreign policy while on dreaded "foreign soil"? Here's what happened in 2006 when Al Gore gave a speech at a conference in Saudi Arabia in which he criticized Bush policies towards the Muslim world -- as summarized by The New York Times' Chris Sullentrop:

As House Democrats David Bonior and Jim McDermott may recall from their trip to Baghdad on the eve of the Iraq war, nothing sets conservative opinionmongers on edge like a speech made by a Democrat on foreign soil. Al Gore traveled to Saudi Arabia last week, and in a speech there on Sunday he criticized "abuses" committed by the U.S. government against Arabs after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A burst of flabbergasted conservative blogging followed the Associated Press dispatch about the speech, with the most clever remark coming from Mark Steyn, who called the former vice president "Sheikh al-Gore." The editorial page of Investor's Business Daily accused Gore of "supreme disloyalty to his country". . . .More

Huckabee: Would Israel Tell Obama Who Can Live in the Bronx?