Jordan Islamists see Obama "fully biased" towards Israel

Jul 30, 2009, 16:01 GMT

Amman - Jordan's influential Muslim Brotherhood movement on Thursday accused the administration of the US President Barack Obama of showing 'complete bias' towards Israel, and warned Arab countries against bowing to Washington pressure to normalize ties with the Jewish state.

'The pressures reportedly put by Obama on Arab countries to normalize ties with the Zionist entity is evidence that this administration is fully biased with the aggressors against the victims,' the movement's leader Hammad Saeed said in a statement.

'Such pressures also wipe out any credibility for this administration's promises to change the hostile approach the United States so far adopted against the Islamic world,' he added.

The statement said that Saeed was responding to a report by the Foreign Policy magazine which revealed that Obama had sent a message to the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates urging them to speed up normalization of ties with Israel to encourage it to freeze settlement activity in Jerusalem and other occupied Palestinian territories.

'The involvement of Arab states in such unjust US scheme will be tantamount to a crime and a conspiracy against the rights of the Palestinian people,' Saeed said.

The Muslim Brotherhood leader also criticized the 'silence' of the Jordanian government over the Israeli authorities' permission for about 200 Jewish extremists to enter al-Aqsa Mosque on Wednesday to perform prayers and other rituals.

Under the peace treaty concluded in 1994, Israel acknowledged Jordan's right to look after the Islamic and Christian shrines in East Jerusalem, which the Jewish state captured from the Hashemite Kingdom in the 1967 Middle East war.