The newly elected Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Baptist Sunday schoolteacher, calls himself an “evangelical Christian.” The first act of the House under his leadership today was to overwhelmingly pass a resolution supporting Israel.
Johnson is associated with some of the most extreme elements in Israel. He accompanied Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) to Israel in 2020, on a trip paid for by a foundation run by Avi Abelow, an American who moved to Israel and got involved in the settlers’ movement to take over lands in Gaza. Part of their tour was organized by the Temple Institute, which aims to build the “Third Temple” on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque—a flash point for religious confrontation with Muslims. The Temple Institute’s strategy is to “generate the awareness necessary to prepare the Jewish people to be ready to then declare sovereignty” over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Jordan had had four earlier trips to Israel over the previous decade, which included a meeting with Simcha Hochbaum, a disciple of “Jewish” fundamentalist Meir Kahane. One trip, in 2011, involved meeting with Kahane’s infamous Kach Party activist David Ha’ivri, the author of Reclaiming the Temple Mount, which included an account of his efforts to organize 10,000 Jews to stop the government from pulling the illegal settlements out of Israel, and to march on the Temple Mount. He was arrested for such actions as celebrating the Nov. 4, 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and for marketing Kach T-shirts, “No Arabs, No Terror.”
In February 2020, the controversial Rabbi Yehudah Glick gave Jordan and Johnson his special tour guide of the Al-Aqsa site for their “Temple Mount” experience. In 2005, Glick had become the Executive Director of the Temple Institute. (Of note, he had just resigned from the government in protest over Israel pulling illegal settlements out of Gaza.) Jordan and Johnson had spent the previous four days visiting Biblical sites in “Judea and Samaria,” as Greater Israel freaks call the West Bank in Palestine.
