Laura Bush’s five-day goodwill mission to the Middle East to promote women’s rights has thus far met with protests, muted applause and fashion criticism.
On arriving at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Sunday, the United States’s first lady ”was treated to a lesson in the strident realities of Middle Eastern street politics”, reported Eric Silver in the Independent. She was heckled by Jewish protesters demanding the release of Jonathan Pollard, ”a researcher in American naval intelligence who has served 20 years of a life sentence for passing classified information to Israel”.
Her trip to al-Aqsa mosque then brought ”anti-American slogans” and ”protests against US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan”, reported the Israeli daily Haaretz. The local press wasn’t much better behaved, said Jim VandeHei in the Washington Post: they ”rattled the first lady’s staff by pushing and shoving”.
On Saturday, Bush had been speaking about women’s rights at the World Economic Forum in Jordan. The United Arab Emirates’ Khaleej Times applauded her intentions, but noted that in a region where democracy is still proving ”elusive”, talk of ”voting rights for women may be a little unrealistic, if not premature”.
The US-based Christian Science Monitor was dismayed that ”the only outburst of applause came with her praise of Kuwait,” where women were last week granted the vote. The restrained response reflected the reality of women’s lives in the region, it said. ”In nearly every institution of society … they are at a profound disadvantage.” By appealing to women, Bush was ”finding another door through which to advance freedom”.
Greer Fay Cashman, writing in the Jerusalem Post, was rather more concerned about what the first lady was wearing when she arrived in Israel: ”a smart, but not severe, black pants suit”. Bush then met the Israeli President, Moshe Katsav, and his wife, Gila, though Katsav soon ”left the women to their own devices”.
What could they have in common, wondered Cashman. Happily, ”both are the mothers of twins” and were able to agree that ”all mothers want peace”. – Guardian Unlimited Â