May 9, 2005 / 22:00 pm
Last weekend, the web site of the New York-based, Catholic League was hacked and uploaded with a message insulting U.S. President George Bush, Israeli President Ariel Sharon, and which made reference to Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and the Palestinian state.
The League, a Catholic civil rights organization, thinks that the attack came in response to comments made Saturday by organization president William Donahue in the New York Post regarding the new film, Kingdom of Heaven.
Donahue said in a statement that, in the Post article, “I was quoted as saying, ‘It is a matter of historical record that Muslim violence—in the form of a jihad—was responsible for Christians striking back, hence the Crusades. Yet in the film, it is the Christians who are the bad guys. This is on the order of doing a movie on the Warsaw Ghetto and blaming the Jews for all the violence.’”
“The next day,” he said, “my cell phone was ringing off the hook alerting me to what happened to our website.”
The Catholic League has contacted the police and FBI who are looking into the incident.
Donahue also chided the hackers for their poor grammar use in the hacked message.