Agencies  --  Arab News

SAN FRANCISCO, 18 April 2004 — The invasion and occupation of Iraq has created widespread animosity against the United States among ordinary citizens across the Middle East, Jordan’s King Abdallah said on Friday. “They turn on the TV and they see an Israeli tank in a tank battle with ordinary Palestinians. The program changes and they see an American tank facing Iraqis,” he said in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

“This has created for the first time that I have felt in the Middle East ... some sort of animosity that I never felt or heard about toward the United States.”

The king, a US ally in the region, was speaking at the start of an American visit that will include talks with US President George W. Bush in Washington next week.

Abdallah said he was deeply concerned about how images of the Iraq war affected the man in the street. “The feeling that is being felt toward the United States around the region and around the world is not a healthy one,” he said. “At the end of the day, you’re being held responsible, rightly or wrongly.”

“As a friend of yours and as one who cares about many, many people in this country, I am very, very worried about the perception toward America and Americans.”

The way to undo these sentiments is to resolve the situation in Iraq and to make progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the monarch said. “You have to go the roots of these problems,” Abdallah said. “Until we solve the Israeli-Palestinian, the Israeli-Arab issue, then none of us will ever be safe.”

Abdallah declined to comment on Bush’s backing on Wednesday for Israeli plans to pull out of the Gaza Strip and keep parts of the West Bank that Israel has held since the 1967 Middle East War. Bush also dismissed the right of Palestinian refugees to return to what is now Israel.

Meanwhile, Jordan’s Lower House of Parliament yesterday denounced the “unjustified bias” of Bush toward Israel, warning that it would add to the Arab world’s rejection of US policy in the Middle East. “The house expresses astonishment over any pre-emptive attitudes toward a final and just solution for the Palestinian question and sees in such stand an unjustified bias that could only lead to an escalation in the rejection of US policy,” a statement issued by the Chamber’s Speaker Abdul Hadi Majali said.

In another development, a dismantled terrorist network planned to attack Jordan’s intelligence headquarters with a chemical bomb which would have killed 20,000 people living in the surrounding area in west Amman, an official involved in the inquiry told AFP in Amman yesterday. “We found primary materials to make a chemical bomb which, if it had exploded, would have made nearly 20,000 deaths ... in an area of one square kilometer,” the official said.