Al Qaida to Comment on Pope?
From Catholic World News:
Sep. 27 (CWNews.com) - An Islamic web site is promising a message from a top leader of Al Qaida, commenting on Pope Benedict's remarks about Islam.
The Islamic site, which has released videotaped messages from Al Qaida leaders in the past, has now posted a banner advertising a message by Ayman al Zawahiri, the second-ranking official in Al Qaida. The banner promises comments on the "Vatican pope" as well as on Darfur and on the "crusader wars" which the site says President George W. Bush has launched.
There was no indication when the message from Zawahiri would be released. But the advertisement suggested that a message-- probably on videotape-- had been promised, and therefore had probably already been completed. In the past Al Qaida has delivered videotapes to Islamic media sites, using couriers to transport the tapes from the terrorist group's headquarters, presumed to be somewhere near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
If the Zawahiri message alludes to the Pope's speech in Regensburg on September 12, it must have been taped recently. Al Qaida has released several messages by Zawahiri in recent weeks, including one that hailed the 5th anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001; in that message the Egyptian terrorist threatened more attacks on the US and its allies.
posted by Pro Ecclesia 2:09 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Imagine the sheer terror that must have reverberated through the halls of Damascus and Cairo about 1000 years ago when word came that the Pope would comment on Islam.
Sad thing is, they had us pretty well beat. I'm not sure they would have been scared at all 1000 years ago. We'd only just barely kept them from spreading out of Spain and into France, they were licking the Byzantines every so often, and that was before the first Crusade.
Come to that, I'm not sure they were really all that impressed by the crusades. There tended to be 2-3 political centers to Dar al Islam at any given time (prior to the Turks coming in) and they were used to occasionally losing territory to each other or to the Byzantines. They didn't like the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but I'm not sure that the Crusades were all that a scarring experience for them at the time the way they've made them in retrospect since the 19th century.
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