In an interview with the Christian Post today, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, the chairman of the World Evangelical Alliance’s Global Task Force on Nuclear Weapons, hailed the Iran deal for offering a “high confidence of inhibiting any move by Iran to a nuclear weapon.”
When the newspaper asked Wigg-Stevenson for his reaction to Mike Huckabee’s claim that the nuclear accord will usher in a second Holocaust and Michele Bachmann’s allegation that it fulfilled Last Days prophecy by paving the way for “World War III,” the World Evangelical Alliance official was not amused.
Noting that many Jewish leaders support the deal, he described Huckabee’s remarks as “pretty outrageous” and “wildly irresponsible,” and expressed bewilderment at Bachmann’s End Times claims: “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“I think that kind of rhetoric is pretty outrageous. The Holocaust is a living memory and I think that because it was Christian Europe that perpetrated the Holocaust on Jews, Christian have an ethical responcibility [sic] forever to take seriously future existential threats to the Jewish people,” he said.
While criticizing Iran’s denial of how devastating the Holocaust truly was, the WEA chair on Nuclear Weapons said that it is an “outrageous stretch of rhetoric for Huackbee [sic] to invoke the Holocaust based on a treaty that the vast majority of arms control experts in the United States have said is a good treaty.”
He added that the GOP presidential candidate’s remarks were “wildly irresponsible,” and pointed out that there is divided opinion in Israel on whether the nuclear deal is a good development or not.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has heavily condemned the lifting of sanctions on Iran, a group of 340 rabbis from “all streams of Judaism” signed a letter in support of the Iran deal earlier this week, opposing the idea that the American Jewish community is united in opposition to the agreement.
As for the idea that the deal will be the fulfillment of biblical End Times prophecy, as former GOP presidential candidate and former Minnesota Rep. Bachmann suggested, Wigg-Stevenson responded: “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
As a former Baptist minister, who told CP he has since become an Anglican, Wigg-Stevenson noted that “people have for hundreds and hundreds of years been pointing to current events as sure indicators that the End Times are upon us.”
He added that statements like Bachmann’s are “nothing new,” and up to this point have never turned out to be correct.
He said that ultimately the Iran deal bars Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and said that “so how that brings about the End Times is beyond me.”
