Earlier in the day, Glick protested his initial detainment:“No one is told to go faster unless he is a Jew with a kippah,” Glick told The Jerusalem Post shortly after his release on Tuesday afternoon. “The discrimination against Jews on the Mount has reached a tipping point, and the time has come to stop it. I am going to continue fighting for ‘Temple Mount for all.’”According to police, early Tuesday morning, Jewish visitors ascended the Mount together with two members of the US Congress, who Glick identified as Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Jim Jordan (R-OH). That visit “went according to plans,” the police said in a statement.However, 10 minutes after the congressmen descended from the holy site, “One of the visitors came back on his own to the Mughrabi Gate area and entered the Mount without coordinating with the police, which is against the rules. Police approached the visitor, who did not listen to police orders, and continued with his provocative behavior,” the police said.“Police responded by detaining the visitor and removing him from the scene,” the police said. “He was arrested and handcuffed.”However, Glick described the situation differently. He told the Post that throughout the morning, police were rushing him and his visitors. Glick is a licensed tour guide.“They just kept saying, ‘Go faster and faster,’” Glick said. “Then they arrested me. During the investigation, they told me, ‘You are arrested because we told you to go faster, and you didn’t go faster.’”He said in recent months he had a sense that the “police are really against me for some reason,” so he had informed Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan, who oversees the site, that he would be ascending on Tuesday with “special guests.”Glick told Erdan he was going to be on the Mount from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. At 9 a.m., Erdan texted him to inquire how the visit went.“Ten minutes later, I found myself on the floor with handcuffs,” Glick recalled.A video widely disseminated on social networks showed the former MK flailing on the ground."The police harassment of former member of Knesset, Yehuda Glick, is violent and improper," said Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein. "It cannot be that in the State of Israel police handcuff a man because he was walking too slowly in their eyes. It cannot be that a person is harassed in the middle of the night on grounds that raise questions marks."Glick was one of the most prominent figures fighting for improved visiting conditions for Jewish and all non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.Glick runs the Shalom Jerusalem Foundation, which he said centers on making the Mount the place it is supposed to be, as described in the Torah: “The Temple Mount is the world’s center of peace. It is a place where people are supposed to be peaceful.”Glick was shot in the chest at point-blank range by a Palestinian terrorist for his activism in 2014 and nearly died.He said since he left the Knesset last year, he has been going up on the Mount every Tuesday. This week, aside from taking the congressmen on a tour, he said he was celebrating his one-year anniversary with his new wife. His previous wife passed away.“Over the last few months, the same visitor has come to visit the Temple Mount and acted in a provocative manner,” the police statement said about Glick.For many years, Jewish visitors, especially those who are religious, were subjected to intense suspicion by the police and were regularly removed from the Mount for small infractions of the accustomed code of conduct.The Murabitun and Murabitat – Palestinian male and female “defenders of the faith” – who were paid to harass and scream at Jewish visitors, made visits very unpleasant. Glick and others campaigned to have them removed from the site, a step eventually carried out by former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon and Erdan, who is also public security minister.“The situation where, under Israeli sovereignty, Jews cannot freely walk around the Temple Mount without police supervision over their steps is delusional and absurd,” Yamina candidate Sarah Beck said in response to Glick’s arrest. “The policy of persecuting... Jews alone encourages Muslim extremism.“It would be better for the State of Israel to take steps against incitement and violence rather than against peaceful Jews who are only seeking to fulfill G-d’s commandments.”החיפוש בעיצומוכל הבית באיפור של הילדה במכונת הכביסה pic.twitter.com/Oj59IF2S4n
— yehudah glick (@YehudahGlick) February 18, 2020
Yehudah Glick tampered with evidence after Temple Mount arrest - Police
"Police officers are in my house at midnight after a day of harassing me."
