The meeting came while the two leaders were in New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly. In a speech there Tuesday, Bush said achieving peace in the Middle East was one of the great objectives of his presidency.

"I fully understand that in order to achieve this vision there must be leaders willing to speak out and act on behalf of people who yearn for peace," Bush said at the end of his meeting with Abbas when reporters were invited in. "And you are such a leader, Mr. President."

The two leaders spoke briefly to the media and did not take questions.

During the 40-minute meeting, deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams said that Bush commended Abbas for his efforts to find a way out of the difficult political situation now that the Palestinian government has no international legitimacy. Bush expressed hopes that progress can be made in talks between Abbas and Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he said.

"The president is really committed to trying to achieve this," Abrams said. "He's well aware of the fact that conditions may, in the end, do not exist to make it possible.

"But he wants it understood that his interest, his commitment, his view that the establishment of a peaceful democratic Palestinian state is very, very much in the interests of Palestinians and Israelis alike."

The U.N. Security Council plans an open meeting Thursday that is intended to revive the peace process.

In his talk Tuesday, Bush challenged Hamas to reject terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, honor existing agreements and work for peace.

Hamas is sworn to Israel's destruction. Abbas has been trying to persuade Hamas leaders to moderate their anti-Israel policies and join with his Fatah Party in a coalition government.

U.S. officials have been concerned that Abbas has not shown greater leadership, while Fatah leaders complain that the United States has done next to nothing to support Abbas.

After the Hamas-led Cabinet took office in late March, the United States and European Union, the two biggest donors to the Palestinian Authority, cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. Abbas wants to resolve the political stalemate in hopes of restarting the flow, but discussions have stalled over the U.S. demand that Hamas fully renounce violence, recognize Israel and agree to abide by commitments made by the previous secular Palestinian leaders.

Abrams said Abbas did not directly ask Bush for more aid.

Abbas met Monday in New York with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the first working session between high-ranking Israeli and Palestinian officials in four months. Afterward, Livni said Israel wants to reopen a serious dialogue with Abbas and work with him to establish a Palestinian state.

The U.S.-backed peace plan aimed to establish a Palestinian state by 2005, but Israel and the Palestinians have failed to carry out their obligations and it has languished.

The efforts for peace were further set back this summer after militants allied with Hamas tunneled from the
Gaza Strip into Israel to kidnap an Israeli soldier. The attack, which came after Israel withdrew last year from the Gaza Strip, sparked a large military offensive in the Palestinian area in which more than 200 Palestinians have been killed, most of them militants.

Days later, Hezbollah guerrillas abducted two soldiers in northern Israel and killed three others, triggering a larger assault across the border into Lebanon that lasted a month.

Bush planned to return to Washington after his meeting with Abbas.

Slowly but surely, the White House has muddied what was once clear lines in pursuit of diplomacy, the newspaper said.

As recently as a month ago, U.S. President George W. Bush and his administration firmly demanded that Iran first suspend its nuclear activities before the U.S. would join negotiations on the nuclear program, "but now U.S. officials have quietly acquiesced in a European-led effort to find a face-saving way for the talks to begin," the article said.

"With allies balking, negotiations appear more likely than punishment," the article said. Bush, in his speech on Tuesday to the UN General Assembly, "used notably mild language when he disucssed Iran, suggesting that the two countries one day will 'be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace.'"

Referring Bush's latest speech that U.S. officials "have no objection to Iran's pursuit of a truly peaceful nuclear power program," the article said "this is a reversal from the policy in the first term, when U.S. officials loudly proclaimed that a country with such vast oil and gas reserves has no need for a nuclear program."

Under pressure from Europeans, the Bush administration dropped that argument late last year, the article said.

"To be getting into what religion my mother is, I don't think it's relevant," Allen tersely replied to Fox. "So I'd like to ask you, why is that relevant? My religion? Jim's religion ..." he said as applause drowned out his remarks.

"My mother is French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her," Allen told the panelist, but did not mention any Jewish heritage.

On Tuesday, Allen said his mother, Henriette "Etty" Allen, grew up in the Christian faith. She is a French-speaking native of Tunisia.

Allen and his siblings also were raised as Christians. He said he became aware only recently that his grandfather, Felix Lumbroso, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis, was Jewish.

"I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including the Lumbroso family line's Jewish heritage, which I learned of from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed," Allen said in the statement.

Allen campaign manager Dick Wadhams would not specify when Allen's mother told him about her ancestry. As a child, Allen knew Lumbroso, who is now deceased, Wadhams said.

Allen accused Webb's campaign of peddling the notion that he is embarrassed by his heritage, a claim Webb spokeswoman Kristian Denny Todd rejected as "completely, totally false."

Fox defended her questions. She said she wanted to determine if there was a political reason Allen was not forthcoming about a Jewish ancestor. "I don't know why it would be so upsetting to him," she said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "I was shocked at how he took offense to the question."

Fox had also asked Allen whether he had learned the word "Macaca" from his mother. Allen had applied the word to a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian descent during an Aug. 11 rally before a mostly white crowd. In some cultures, including Tunisia, the word is considered a racial slur.

Allen glared at Fox for a moment, then said, "I hope you're not trying to bring my mother into this matter."

References to the nationality of Allen's mother prompted the first report of his Jewish ancestry on Aug. 25 in The Forward, a Jewish daily newspaper, said its editor, Ami Eden.

"There was some talk at that time that perhaps he picked this up from his mother, and it was an easy way to get to the story behind the headlines," Eden said in a telephone interview from New York.

Asked if he believes Israelis have no right to exist -- something Ahmadinejad has said in the past -- the Iranian leader responded, "I say that it is an occupying regime."

The Palestinian "nation" as a whole -- including Jews, Christians and Muslims living there and 5 million displaced refugees -- should be able to vote to decide "what its fate should be."

Pressed on his previous assertions that the Holocaust did not happen, Ahmadinejad declined to address the issue, saying, "Since I've talked a lot about this subject, I don't want to repeat myself."

But he did address whether the Holocaust should be used as a "pretext for occupying Palestinian land" when the Palestinians had nothing to do with the genocide in Europe.

"If this event happened, where did it happen?" he asked. "The 'where' is the main question, and it was not in Palestine."

A staunch critic of U.S. policy and President Bush, Ahmadinejad also took issue with comments Bush made to the Iranian people during his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday.

Bush told Iranians their rulers "have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation's resources to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons."

Ahmadinejad responded by saying he didn't know what the president "is actually thinking when he makes remarks like that."

"This is not the kind of language you speak talking with a great nation. It is an insult to a great nation," Ahmadinejad said.

He also insisted that Iran's nuclear program was peaceful and that his government had complied with its international obligations, despite reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency questioning whether Iran has been forthcoming about its nuclear activities.

"They have to tell us exactly what provisions of the (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) they are speaking of, which they believe we have not abided by," Ahmadinejad said. "They are interested in getting more information, and we are ready to cooperate with them."

Some 73 percent also said they agreed with the French separation of church and state -- an issue spotlighted two years ago by a contentious ban on religious signs including Muslim headscarves in state schools.

Fully 94 percent said they believed people were equal regardless of their religion, and 46 percent that it was acceptable for a Muslim to convert to Christianity -- against 45 percent who said the opposite.

Young French Muslims were the least flexible on the issues of conversion from Islam -- opposed by 56 percent of 18-24 year olds -- and inter-religious marriage, with 31 percent against the idea compared with 26 percent overall.

The survey suggested that France's Muslims are, on average, younger than the general population, with 49 percent aged under 30 -- compared with one in four people nationwide, or one in six Roman Catholics.

France does not compile official statistics on racial, ethnic or religious groups on the grounds that they undermine the principle of equal citizenship.

French Muslims were generally observant of major religious rites, the study suggested, with 88 percent saying they fast during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan and 44 percent saying they pray five times a day.

But 30 percent said they never read from the Koran. Only 17 percent -- most of them men -- went to mosque once a week, while 49 percent never did so.

While only four percent had made the pilgrimage to Mecca -- a religious obligation for Muslims -- three quarters said they hoped one day to do so.

The poll of 513 Muslims aged 18 and over, selected from a nationwide sample of 15,000, was conducted by telephone between April 17 and August 30.