Protests mark Laura Bush visit
2005-05-22 18:13
Jerusalem - US first lady Laura Bush faced Palestinian and Israeli protests on Sunday as she toured Jewish and Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City during a one-day visit to Israel and the West Bank.
Wearing a black headscarf and accompanied by the wife of Israeli President Moshe Katsav, Bush spent a few moments of silence in the women's section at Judaism's holiest shrine, the Western Wall, which is last remnant of the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
Security was bristling around her as she placed a prayer note between the stones of the ancient wall, with the nearest female worshippers kept a clear two metres away.
Among the bystanders, dozens of young women waved photographs of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American who was jailed for life in 1987 in the United States on charges of spying for Israel.
A slightly larger group of men, some of them symbolically handcuffed, also shouted slogans calling for Pollard's release.
At the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam which overlooks the Wailing Wall, the response to her visit was slightly more hostile, with a handful of protestors shouting "Death to America" as she entered the golden-topped Dome of the Rock.
But the visit passed peacefully, arousing little interest among local Palestinian stallholders, who dismissed the trip by the wife of US President George W Bush as little more than a photo opportunity for the media.
"It's mainly a publicity stunt," said Mazen, a 50-year-old carpet seller. "What we want to see is results on the ground. President Bush promised to resolve the conflict two years ago, but nothing has changed."
"Band of criminials," snorted Hassanin, 43, referring to the Bush family. "We don't care about any American presidents or their wives. They don't help us."
Only the radical Islamist Hamas movement commented on her visit to the mosque compound, saying it demonstrated US support for Israel's claim to occupied east Jerusalem where the site is located.
This visit "confirms the American position that Jerusalem is the capital of the Zionists, and this will give more legality to the continued occupation of this place, which is of prime importance for Muslims", Hamas said.
"We do not reject any visit by anyone to the Al-Aqsa but we see Mrs Bush's visit as an attempt to whiten the face of America after the ugly crime carried out by US investigators against the Koran," it said.
The statement was referring to a since-retracted report by US magazine Newsweek that interrogators at a US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet in a bid to rattle Muslim inmates.
After her visit to the Old City, Bush went to the desert oasis town of Jericho in the West Bank where she met with several top Palestinian women, including minister without portfolio Hind Khouri and independent MP Hanan Ashrawi.
"We told her about the reality of the occupation and how it interferes with everything in our lives," Ashrawi told AFP. "We also told her that we want President Bush's two-state vision to become a reality on the ground."
The US leader's wife was expected to visit the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Jerusalem before leaving for Egypt later on Sunday to continue her six-day tour of the region.