Presidential hopeful Ben Carson implied that the Iran deal is antisemitic. Photo: Facebook.

Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson suggested on Sunday that the Iran nuclear deal spearheaded by President Barack Obama is antisemitic.

“I think anything is antisemitic that is against the survival of a state that is surrounded by enemies and by people who want to destroy them and to sort of ignore that and to act like everything is normal there and that these people are paranoid, I think that’s antisemitic,” Carson said on Fox News Sunday when asked about a recent Jerusalem Post op-ed he had written on the subject.

Although the retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeons did not specifically mention the Iran deal, he said that during a recent visit to Israel he could not find one person who “didn’t feel that this administration has turned its back on Israel.”

Indirectly criticizing Obama, Carson said a U.S. president should hold a position that “begins to draw people together behind a vision, not one where you castigate those who believe different from you.”

In the Jerusalem Post article, the surgeon-turned-politician called President Obama the “divider-in-chief” and said the language he has used to argue for the Iran nuclear agreement had “antisemitic themes.”

Carson ranked second nationally among the 17 GOP presidential contenders in the most recent Fox News poll, Politico reported. Holding the number one spot is business tycoon Donald Trump, who said on Sunday that the Iran deal will result in a “nuclear Holocaust.”

Watch Ben Carson talk about the Iran deal in the video below: