US President Barack Obama holds anti-Semitic views that has prompted him to abandon the people of Israel, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson maintained.
In an interview on Sunday, Carson stood firm on the views he expressed in an opinion article he wrote for The Jerusalem Post entitled "White House employing ugly tactics to sell a rotten Iran deal."
In the article, the Republican presidential aspirant said Obama's recent speech supporting the Iran nuclear deal was "replete with coded innuendos employing standard anti-Semitic themes."
He also accused Obama of stooping "to new lows far beneath the dignity of the office of the presidency" in defending the Iran nuclear deal.
In an interview with "Fox News Sunday," Carson defended the remarks he made in the opinion article, saying that his recent visit to Israel made him realise that he "couldn't find a single person there who didn't feel that this administration had turned their backs on Israel."
Carson, a former paediatric neurosurgeon, maintained that this is the prevailing sentiment towards President Obama across Israel.
"All you have to do ... is go to Israel and talk to average people on all ends of that spectrum," the Republican presidential hopeful said.
He added that the Obama government's supposed lack of concern and action for the Israeli people is essentially "anti-Semitic."
"I think anything is anti-Semitic that is against the survival of a state that is surrounded by enemies and people who want to destroy them," Carson said.
"To act like everything is normal there and that these people are paranoid, I think that's anti-Semitic," he added.
This is not the first time Carson made controversial and quite hyperbolic statements against the Obama administration.
Last year, he compared the Internal Revenue Service's moves against conservative groups to the intimidation tactic employed before in Nazi Germany.
