Bin Laden Makes (Voice) Appearance

Osama bin Laden accused Pope Benedict XVI of helping a "new crusade" against Islam Wednesday in an audiotape released to Al-Jazeera. He also spoke out against Palestinian peace negotiations and called for a holy war to liberate the Palestinian lands.

"Palestine cannot be retaken by negotiations and dialogue, but with fire and iron," he said.

The Vatican rejected the accusation against the pope and said it is not altering security measures during the week leading up to Easter Sunday, when he makes several public appearances.

“These accusations are absolutely unfounded,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the pope’s chief spokesman, said in a telephone interview. “There is nothing new in this, and it doesn’t have any particular significance for us.”

Bin Laden said the pope may have been behind the controversial cartoons printed in 2006 in several newspapers around the world, which depicted the Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban drawn as a bomb. In February, several Danish newspapers reprinted the image as a symbol for freedom of speech after police said they had uncovered the beginnings of a plot to kill the artist.

He said the cartoons "came in the framework of a new Crusade in which the Pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role," according to a transcript released by the SITE Institute, a U.S. group that monitors terror messages.

"You went overboard in your unbelief and freed yourselves of the etiquettes of dispute and fighting and went to the extent of publishing these insulting drawings," he said. "This is the greater and more serious tragedy, and reckoning for it will be more severe."

European officials are taking precautions. Italian antiterrorism officials are meeting on Friday to analyze the tape.

What a mess.