JAKARTA, September 27 (IslamOnline.net) - The United States is unloved in the Muslim world due to its policy in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, occupation of Iraq and its preoccupation with fundamentalists, a group of Muslim intellectuals told U.S. officials and experts, who wanted to know the reason behind rising anti-U.S. sentiments among Muslims, reported a leading U.S. newspaper.

Speaking through videoconference in a hotel conference room Thursday night, September 25, leaders of the largest Muslim organizations in Indonesia asserted it was not a public relations problem, but rather the U.S. foreign policy was the main culprit, said the New York Times Friday, September 26.

"There is no point in saying this is a problem of communication, blah blah blah," said Yenni Zannuba Wahid, 28, who is the daughter of former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, and who has just returned from a year of graduate study at Harvard.

"The perception in the Muslim world is that the problem is the policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq," she told the U.S. panel, who are to report to the White House and Congress Wednesday, October 1.

The head of the U.S. panel, Edward P. Djerejian, who is a former United States Ambassador to Syria, was on the screen in front of them with several of his colleagues, the daily said.

The 12-member panel also included John Zogby, the president of the polling company, Zogby International, and Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland, who was assigned by Congress to suggest solutions to anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.

"Ms. Wahid said that the panel should consider the following if they simply want answers to their questions: "How come what the extremists say has currency with the larger mass in the Muslim world? How is it the radicals manage to use the political situation to advance what they are preaching?"

At the invitation of the American Embassy in Jakarta, the Indonesians were invited to a dinner at 6 p.m., the time when many Muslims go to the mosque for prayers, according to the paper.

Ms. Wahid said: "My more conservative friends were asking: `Why at 6 p.m.? Are they doing this on purpose?' "

Zaki M. Mansoer, the director of a Muslim magazine, Panjimas criticized the United States' preoccupation with Muslim fundamentalists.

These people have a right to practice that form of their religion, just as fundamentalist Christians do in America, he was quoted as saying.

"It will take time to build trust again. You can't make a quick fix. This is the equivalent of nation-building," Mansoer said.

The panel was supposed to visit Pakistan and Indonesia, but faced with a tight budget and a scramble to write the report by Wednesday, it made do with videoconferences, the paper said.

The dialogue with Indonesia was intended to give the panel a sample of opinion in the world's most populous Muslim country.

The tour took the Djerejian group to Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul. In Cairo, Egyptian intellectuals asserted to the panel that American support for Israel at the expense of the Palestinians alienated the Arab world, reported the NY Times.

Stephen P. Cohen, one of the panel members who is a senior scholar with the Israel Policy Forum, said many of the Muslims interviewed held "a great deal of regard for American values, especially American education."

But the daily quoted him as saying that this only makes things worse.