CNN

Rudy Giuliani wasn't a fan of Obama's videotaped message to Iran.

(CNN) – Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said Monday that President Obama emboldened terrorists and looked like a pushover in his recent videotaped remarks to the people of Iran.

"Sending a videotaped message into Iran and the language and tone of that message, in my view, is the kind of thing terrorists look at and say 'we can take advantage, we can push,'" Giuliani said on MSNBC.

"I think it was a mistake. It needed balancing language about his recognition of the complete lack of freedom within Iran, even as a strong message to the Iranian people," he said of the White House video, which was posted online last month. "You get one chance to talk to the people of Iran. They're watching. You want to create a reformist element in Iran and you don't speak to that?"

"This is why terrorist would say, 'we can take advantage of a guy like that,'" he said.

Giuliani argued that because Obama failed to call out the Iranian government directly on matters such as human rights violations and the oppression of women, Iranian reformers probably became disheartened. "I think it turns off the reformers when they listen to a one-sided messages and they dont hear very strong language about what's going in their country," he said.

"He didn't talk about any of the things we need from them," Giuliani said of the president. "He is talking to a dictatorship. He is not talking to a liberal democracy. If you listen to that, you would think he was talking to a liberal democracy."