CAIRO & AMMAN, June 26 (IslamOnline) - The statement read out by U.S. President George W. Bush June 24, regarding the situation in the Middle East, has left negative effects in the Egyptian and Jordanian media circles, especially with the U.S. President’s call on Arab governments to curb any expressions of support of the Palestinian resistance.

Hamdein Subahi, member of the Egyptians Journalists Syndicate, said that he regards Bush’s statement as running counter to all freedom charters by curbing freedoms and imposing guardianship on citizens of other countries. This, he said is unacceptable and Egyptian journalists will continue to call for the support of the Palestinian struggle and to refuse the Israeli occupation, no matter what.

He said that the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate considers Bush’s statement a bias towards the aggressor, through which Bush has made it clear that he is a member of the radical Israeli Likud Party and he should draw plans for the future of the region, as long as he lacks the integrity and experience to play this role.

Subahi said that the statement shows that Bush and Sharon are two sides of the same coin and that they are both an enemy to “our nation”. Governments, he said, must understand this truth and deal with matters on this basis. He said that resistance operations could never be considered as terrorism and that no Arab government will dare reject that under the current situation.

The former head of the Journalists’ Syndicate in Egypt, and renowned Egyptian writer Kamel Zaheri, agreed with Subahi about resistance operations and said that it is out of the hands of the governments to support it. He added that it has become a necessity imposed by the national requirement inside Palestine and not related to a particular movement.

He said that Bush’s statement reveals the superficiality and ignorance which the president of the world’s super power is using to deal with one of the most serious problems in the world.

Bush, he said, was unaware that resisting the aggressor is a national duty recognized by all laws and customs and that Bush was unaware of the experience of the French occupation in Algeria and the role resistance played to combat this colonialism, in addition to the French experience in resisting Nazi occupation.

The problem, Zuhairi said, is that the U.S. is geographically distant from the region and is historically superficial and all what occupies its mind is imposing more control on the largest oil resource areas in the world. The proof of that, he said, is the mysterious war which Bush started on Afghanistan - a war, he said, which had no defined time-frame or goals.

Zuhairi added that Bush is clearly repeating the same scenario of his father in which he bluffed the Arabs in Madrid, with the notion of a provisional state for the Palestinians.

He said that not talking about or supporting resistance operations will not change the current situation because whoever takes this decision will not change his mind based on an article he read or a program he saw, and to along these lines is to be “comically superficial”.

Zuhairi called on the Arab governments to learn from the lesson they received from George Bush Sr. who made them enter a decade of negotiations in a vicious circle with no results.

Mustafa Bakri, editor-in-chief of the weekly Egyptian paper, Al-Usboo, said that the contents of Bush’s speech is a blatant interference in the internal affairs of the Arab countries. He said that the governments should reject the speech completely.

Meanwhile in Jordan, the media personnel also rejected the speech . Tareq Al-Momni, head of the Jordanian Journalists’ Syndicate told IslamOnline that he was shocked that these statements came out of a president of a country that claims to be democratic.

He added that he rejects dubbing the coverage of Arab media as enticement and said that Jordanian and Arab media covers objectively what goes on in the occupied territories.

“Does President Bush want us to beautify the ugly image of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon?” he asked.

Taher Al-Udwan, editor-in-chief of Jordanian newspaper, Al-Arab Al-Youm, criticized the statement saying that instead, “we need to ask him to stop the racist American media coverage against the Palestinians and Arabs.”