Remember when Pickles got heckled out of a Mosque on her Mideast vacation? What an embarrassment [View All]

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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/21/politics/main697019_page2.shtml

Protesters Greet First Lady

Laura Bush Visits Holy Sites In Jerusalem

JERUSALEM, May 23, 2005


(AP) "As you can tell from our day here, this is a place of emotions everywhere we went, from the Dome of the Rock to the Western Wall" she told reporters at the palace ruins.

As for the peace process, Mrs. Bush said the U.S. would do whatever it could, but that both sides share responsibility in helping achieve peace. snip

Anti-American sentiment is running high in the Mideast because of a variety of factors, including a now-retracted report in Newsweek that Pentagon investigators had found evidence interrogators at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, placed copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, in washrooms to unsettle suspects and flushed a Quran down a toilet.

"We in principle don't reject anyone's visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque (compound), but we see in the visit of Mrs. Bush an attempt to whitewash the face of the United States, after the crimes that the American interrogators had committed when they desecrated the Quran," the militant Islamic Hamas group said in a statement on its Web site.

Adnan Husseini, director of the Islamic Trust that administers the mosque compound, said Mrs. Bush tried to play down the heckling, saying it could have happened anywhere.