Last Updated on March 21, 2024
GOP Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson says that he’s planning to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress and Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says that he supports bringing in Netanyahu as well. The prospective Netanyahu speech comes as Israel continues its war effort in Gaza and as the United States continues funding it, much to the satisfaction of both parties and despite widespread concern over the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians, particularly children, by Israeli forces.
Speaker Mike Johnson, an ardent supporter of Israel who made declaring Congress’s loyalty to the foreign nation his first priority after being elected Speaker of the House, says that he is “certainly” planning to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has seconded the idea.
The prospective invitation comes as the House and Senate try to pass a massive foreign aid bill, stuffed full of $100 billion worth of funding for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan while leaving America’s southern border wide open and as ranking members of both parties in both the House and the Senate blast the idea of negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza, where tens of thousands of children have been killed and where the ongoing war is threatening to engulf the entire Middle East.
In addition to his calls for Netanyahu to address Congress, Speaker Johnson has been invited to deliver an address of his own to the Israeli Knesset and says that he’s currently working out the scheduling.
Related: Mike Johnson Shills For Israel, Says ‘The Calls For A Ceasefire Are Outrageous’
The invitation to Netanyahu won’t mark the first time that he’s addressed a Joint Session of the United States Congress, a privilege that was also recently extended to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who showed up in a sweatshirt to demand that the United States do more to support Ukraine’s war effort, and even unfurled a Ukrainian flag from the podium.
In 2015, when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a joint session, he claimed that Iran was in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon that it would then deploy against Israel, triggering another Holocaust.
“Iran’s supreme leader…spews the oldest hatred of anti-Semitism with the newest technology,” Netanyahu told the joint session at the time, in between his repeated references and inuendos regarding the Holocaust.
