Mrs. Bush besieged by Protesters at Jerusalem’s most sacred sites

JERUSALEM - Mrs. Bush, who is on a tour intended partly to help defuse anti-American sentiment in the region, was besieged by Protesters to two of Jerusalem’s most sacred sites, with Israeli police locking arms to restrain the crowd and Secret Service agents packed tightly around America’s first lady.

As she was touring Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest shrine, and the neighbouring Dome of the Rock, two members of the radical Islamic Liberation Party shouted: “You are not welcome here. How dare you come here? Why your husband kill Muslims?”

The first lady was mobbed by protesters and local reporters, and Secret Service agents and Israeli police had to physically hold back the crowd as she approached the wall.

Dozens of protesters stood nearby, shouting, “Free Pollard now.” Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who is serving life sentence in a U.S. prison for spying for Israel, was a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy.

Although the visit was billed as non-political, the protesters took the opportunity to register their anger at the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and what they see as its continuing war on Islam.

“If the police hadn’t stepped in,” a Palestinian employee of the US consulate-general told The Independent, “there would have been a massacre. The Muslim officials didn’t do anything to stop the protesters. If they’d got any closer, the American security men would have shot them.”

Mrs Bush remained poised and unflappable. “She took things in stride,” a US spokesman confided.

Stepping into the long-running Mideast conflict, she appealed for Israelis and Palestinians to commit to working for peace and said Americans “will do what they can in this process.”

The demonstrations at the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock showed “what an emotional place this is as we go from each one of these very, very holy sites to the next,” Mrs. Bush said later in the West Bank town of Jericho as she stood at the ruins of the 8th-century Hisham’s Palace.

“We’re reminded again of what every one of us would want… What we all want is peace and the chance that we have right now to have peace, to have a Palestinian state living by a secure state of Israel, both living in democracy, is as close as we’ve been in a really long time,” she said at an ancient home of Islamic spiritual leaders.

Mrs. Bush removed her shoes as she entered the mosque and walked barefoot on the red carpet. She held a black scarf tightly around her head as she gazed up at the gilded dome and the colorful mosaics on the marble walls.

Some of the women studying inside the mosque were clearly annoyed at the intrusion and waved their fingers at the U.S. entourage. Despite the chaos at both sites, Mrs. Bush kept smiling and said little.

In Jericho, which is under Palestinian control, security was tight and no protesters were evident when Mrs. Bush visited the ruins and met at a hotel with leading Palestinian women.

Mrs Bush arrived in Israel from Jordan, where she addressed a World Economic Forum conference on the Middle East on the shore of the Dead Sea. She pulled no punches with the male chauvinists of the Arab states. Calling for greater voting rights for women, she warned 1,300 international business and political leaders: “Women who have not yet won these rights are watching. They are calling on the consciences of their countrymen, making it clear that if the right to vote is to have any meaning, it cannot be limited to men only.

“Freedom, especially freedom for women, is more than the absence of oppression. It’s the right to speak and vote and worship freely. Human rights require the rights of women.”