Protesters jostled and harangued US First Lady Laura Bush on Sunday when she visited a flashpoint Jerusalem shrine holy to both Muslims and Jews and at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Israeli police and US Secret Service agents formed a tight cordon around her to push back crowds in what for Bush, on a Middle East goodwill tour, was a rare close encounter with hostile demonstrators.A small crowd of about two dozen people pressed in on Bush as she entered the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem’s walled Old City. A Palestinian worshipper cried out at her: ‘‘You are not welcome here. Why are you hassling our Muslims? How dare you come in here?’’Bush, who made an appeal for peace later, did not respond to him or an old woman inside the mosque who shouted ‘‘Koran, Koran’’ at her in Arabic. Bush, dressed in a black pantsuit, with black headscarf donned in religious respect and held tightly on her head, exited with police linking arms around her to ward off onlookers.She began a Middle East trip on Friday acknowledging that the US image in the Muslim world had been badly damaged by a prisoner abuse scandal and a magazine report, since retracted, that US interrogators desecrated the Koran. Shortly before visiting the mosque, Bush appeared at the adjacent ancient Western Wall and was confronted by dozens of nationalist Jews demanding Washington free convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. They shouted and waved placards.Bush inserted a small handwritten note in a cleft of the wall and paused there for about 60 seconds before returning to her heavily-guarded motorcade for the short trip to the mosque. The disturbances during her trip to the Jerusalem holy site showed ‘‘what an emotional place this is as we go from each one of these very, very holy spots to the next,’’ Bush said later during a stop in the West Bank oasis town of Jericho.‘‘We’re reminded again of what we all want, what every one of us prays for.what we all want is peace,’’ said Bush, who in Jericho heard complaints from Palestinian women about Israeli occupation policies such as roadblocks.She said the chance of achieving peace ‘‘right now . is as close as we’ve been in a really long time. It will take a lot of baby steps and I’m sure (there) will be a few steps backward on the way’’. — Reuter
