House Speaker John Boehner made a mistake inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress next month — and the Israeli prime minister erred by accepting, legendary conservative pundit Pat Buchanan says.
"I disagree with what John Boehner did and I disagree with what the prime minister did," Buchanan said Thursday on "The Steve Malzberg Show," on
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Netanyahu is set to address Congress on the dangers of Iran’s growing nuclear program on March 3 following an invitation by Boehner.
But Boehner did not follow normal protocol by coordinating the invite with the Obama administration, which then announced the president would not meet with Netanyahu.
"It's a mistake to come over here and Boehner to give him time to criticize the foreign policy of the president of the U.S. in the same forum as the State of the Union," Buchanan said.
But the bestselling author and former communications director for President Reagan added that Democratic members of Congress should not boycott Netanyahu's address, as some have hinted they will.
"I don't think we want to compound [Boehner's error]," Buchanan said. "Folks in the Congress of the United States, if they're there, they ought to go and hear the speech."
In addition to spanking Boehner, Buchanan is also fuming at Obama for comparing the extreme barbarity of the Islamic State (ISIS) to the Crusades, in which horrifying acts were carried out a thousand years ago in the name of Jesus Christ.
Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, in Washington, D.C., the president tore into against ISIS as "a brutal, vicious death cult" that brutally kills in the name of religion — comments sparked by the execution of a Jordanian pilot who was caged and burned alive.
"He's trying to give them all equivalence to what happened in the 11th century to what's happening today? It's astonishing," Buchanan said.
"The whole idea of the inquisition in Spain — I mean these things are hundreds of years ago. That was a 30-year war long, long ago.
"I can't think of any atrocities that have really been committed in the name of Christ.... There's no justification anywhere in all the books of the New Testament for any kind of violence on the scale of what we just saw with that Jordanian pilot."
Buchanan said Obama has a "real problem with the cold hard truth and reality of our times" regarding terrorism.
"There is an element in the Islamic community worldwide, which has awakened and is embarked on a global crusade of its own to conquer Western countries," Buchanan said.
"But first [they want to conquer] Arab and Muslim countries and to impose upon them a Sharia law to expel the Christians, Jews, and the nonbelievers if they're Shiite and not part of what they consider the mainstream.
"They're using all manner of violence in order to achieve this, from Boko Haram to ISIS to Ansar al-Sharia and to al-Qaida. Can the president not see the reality of his own time that he's got to retreat centuries to find what he thinks might be a moral equivalence?"
Buchanan also ruffled at Obama's reference to racial segregation laws during the Jim Crow era during the same speech.
"To call it Jim Crow, which was a form of segregation of racists, to say that was rooted in Christianity, it seems to be an absurdity and injustice," he said.
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