The Islamic State’s vow to "conquer Rome" is a deadly terrorist threat against the Vatican, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, told
Newsmax TV.
And, Donohue added, the radical Islamist terror group — which savagely beheaded 21 Coptic Christians in Libya last weekend — is also out to get world leaders and top Israeli religious figures.
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"The Vatican is under serious threat," Donohue said Tuesday on the "Steve Malzberg Show."
"Any world leaders, I would think major rabbis in Jerusalem, would also be under severe threat … "
Rome is under heavy police guard following the release of a video which 21 Egyptian Christians were slaughtered one by one and an Islamic State leader boasts his group "will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission."
Security has been beefed up around Vatican City and the city’s top monuments and churches, including the Coliseum.
On Monday, Pope Francis denounced the 21 killings as a "barbaric assassination of Coptic Christians by Islamic fundamentalists."
Donohue said President Barack Obama should also be able to identify the ISIS terror machine as Islamic fundamentalists — something he has so far declined to do because he "doesn’t want to offend Muslims."
He said he was also flabbergasted by State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf’s suggestion that what Islamic State terrorists need are jobs.
On MSNBC’s "Hardball with Chris Matthews," Harf said, "We're killing a lot of them, and we're going to keep killing more of them. ... But we cannot win this war by killing them. We need ... to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs … "
She later said the U.S. should join other countries to "help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people."
"Imagine saying this about the Nazis? The way to get them to stop killing them the Jews is we give these guys a job," Donohue told Malzberg.
"They always think about the root cause of this stuff as if the jobs and the money matter … Look, the only way to win a war is to defeat the enemy and in this particular case, diplomacy's not going to work."
"I thought [what Harf said] was 'Saturday Night Live,' I mean, in all honesty."
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