Pope Benedict XVI recently asked Muslim leaders to teach Islam to young Muslims more effectively, so that they would not become terrorists. He thus evidently thinks that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists. However, it appears that Al-Qaeda is working hard to convince him otherwise. From Expatica, :
BARCELONA “” Spanish police have arrested one man in connection with alleged threats by Al Qaeda against the Vatican.
It comes after a document was sent to the Madrid daily ABC and Television Española in the name of Al Qaeda and containing threats against the Vatican.
ABC reported the document, a three-page Arabic manuscript, was mailed from Barcelona and contained the headings ‘Operation Vatican’ and ‘Iraq and the World Terrorist Attack’.
The document says ‘the Iraq war has won the Vatican’s support for the capitalist countries, all for Iraqi oil’.
“Those authorities will reap what they have sown with their support, and for those they have killed,” the document says.
It also justifies Islamic extremist bomb attacks in Madrid last year and last month in London as “acts of self-defence against the terrorism being effected in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
The fact that virtually any jihad attack is characterized as an “act of self-defense” demonstrates that protestations that Islam only allows for defensive warfare do nothing to prove that modern-day terror is illegimate from a Muslim standpoint. Those who claim that it is a religion of peace that allows only for defensive fighting have thus done nothing to induce violent Muslims to lay down their arms.