Washington Post: Huckabee and Iranian supreme ayatollah on same page on Sandy Hook

[Enrique]

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei echoes Mike Huckabee on Newtown school shooting

The struggle to understand a tragedy, such as the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, can make for strange bedfellows. In an odd moment, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seem to have (unintentionally) converged on similar conclusions about the event’s cause: lack of religion.

It’s not clear how direct of a line Huckabee wants to draw between Friday’s shooting and an absence of religion in schools. But he drew wide criticism for possibly suggesting as much on Fox News recently. The full interview transcript can be found here, with the key quote below (emphasis added):

Well, you know it’s an interesting thing. We ask why there’s violence in our schools but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability. That we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police if they catch us but one day we stand before a holy God in judgment. If we don’t believe that, then we don’t fear that.

Monday, Huckabee is apparently joined by the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Khamenei. According to Digarban, an independent Web outlet that covers the Iranian media, one of Khamenei’s official representatives announced that a “lack of religion in the United States is the main reason of the school shooting.”

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