CAIRO: On the eve of his first visit to the United States as Egypt’s president, Islamist Mohammad Mursi said he would demonstrate more independence from the U.S. in decision-making than his predecessor Hosni Mubarak and told Washington not to expect Egypt to live by its rules. Mursi sent that message in an interview with the New York Times after violence erupted across the Muslim world over an amateur film produced in the U.S. that was deemed offensive to Islam. The protests raised news tensions between the U.S. and Egypt.
 
Mursi criticized U.S. dealings with the Arab world, saying it is not possible to judge Egyptian behavior and decision-making by American cultural standards. He said Washington earned ill will in the region in the past by backing dictators and taking “a very clear” biased approach against the Palestinians and for Israel.
 
“Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region,” he told the paper in the interview published late Saturday, drawing a clear distinction between the American government and the American people. Those administrations “have taken a very clear biased approach against something that [has] very strong emotional ties to the people of the region that is the issue of Palestine.”
 
He stressed that unlike his predecessor, Mubarak, he would behave “according to the Egyptian people’s choice and will, nothing else.”
 
Mursi has been expected to distance himself from what many Egyptians saw as Mubarak’s compliance with Washington’s agenda in the Middle East, especially because his Muslim Brotherhood group has been a vocal critic of U.S. policy in the region and in the Muslim world.
 
In an earlier interview Saturday, Mursi reaffirmed his stance on Syria and his insistence that Iran be included in talks to end the crisis there.
 
The Syrian regime needs to understand that the continuation of bloodshed goes against all laws, desires, history and humanity,” Mursi said on state TV – his first local television interview since taking office.
 
“Egypt is not on the sidelines of this problem. There is a positive and personal relationship between the Egyptian people and the Syrian people,” he said, in a reference to the shortly lived alliance that ended in 1961 between Egypt and Syria, when both nations shared the same flag as part of a union.
 
“The Syrian struggle pains us now, pains all people of the region.”
 
Mursi has launched an “Islamic Quartet” of regional powers to seek an end to the violence, bringing together Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
 
However, the quartet faces deep divisions. Sunni-led Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have called on Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, while Shiite Iran firmly backs him.
 
“I do not believe Iran’s presence in the group is part of the problem, but part of the solution,” Mursi said, adding that he hoped the four nations along with other countries could meet “at the highest level” on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting later this month.
 
While he did not discuss Israel, with which Egypt has a decades-old peace treaty following years of war, Mursi said that “there cannot be peace in the Middle East without giving Palestinians their full rights.”
 
“This is what the peace treaty was based on – a full and balanced [regional] peace,” he said, referring to the 1979 accord that ended decades of hostility between Egypt and Israel, but did not contain the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
 
Mursi dismissed criticism that he responded too slowly when protesters managed to scale the walls of the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11.
 
He said he needed to deal with the situation “wisely” and took time to avoid a backlash from an angry but small crowd of protesters.
 
In a letter, U.S. President Barack Obama thanked Mursi for securing the embassy during protests.
 
Obama repeated Washington’s condemnation of the film and said that he looked forward to working with the Egyptian president in order to build on the “strategic partnership,” Mursi’s official Facebook page said Sunday.