AMMAN: Jordan’s influential Muslim Brotherhood movement yesterday accused the administration of the US President Barack Obama of showing “complete bias” with Israel, and warned Arab countries against bowing to Washington’s pressures to normalize ties with the Jewish state.
“The pressure put by Obama on Arab countries to normalize ties with Israel is an evidence that this administration is fully biased with the aggressors against the victims,” the movement’s leader Hammad Saeed said. “Such pressures also wipe out any credibility for this administration’s promises to change the hostile approach the US has so far adopted against the Islamic world.”
The statement said Saeed was responding to a report by the Foreign Policy magazine which revealed that Obama had sent a message to seven Arab leaders 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 versus the Israeli authorities’ permission of about 200 Jewish fanatics 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.
