Pope plays into hands of al-Qaida

IS Pope Benedict a secret weapon of al-Qaida?

Probably not, but he might as well be — at least according to what I’ve just seen on an al-Qaida website.

Nor is it enough for his aids and spindoctors to say he was misrepresented. The Pope is not Salman Rushdie being unjustly targeted by a crisis-ridden Iranian dictatorship for purposes of internal repression.

Rather, this is the ‘Panzer Pope’ who, along with his one-time membership of the Hitler Youth, has a long history of involvement with sinister right-wing organisations after World War II.

And recently he spoke out against Turkey’s membership of the EU — it is a Muslim country. The Pope’s outrageous remarks have to be seen in this context.

What annoys me is that the Pope’s racism brands the whole occidental world — whether Catholic or Protestant, Orthodox, agnostic or atheist — as being involved in the very crusade against Islam that al-Qaida and other Islamic fundamentalists claim. For example, it was a Maronite Orthodox Church that got torched in Jerusalem by Hamas supporters after the Pope made his remarks.

As with US President George W Bush’s inept handling of the war on terror — subordinated to the economic and strategic interests of a declining US imperialism and bereft of the kind of political initiative by which such a war should be complemented — what we see here are two examples of end-time religious fundamentalism feeding off each other to the detriment of everyone in between. As an atheist, I say God help us from all end-time fundamentalists, whether they be in the Vatican, the White House or inspiring suicide bombers from Damascus and Teheran, or from inside a cave in east Pakistan.

Roger Cottrell

School of English

Queens University

Belfast