Pope Benedict has poked a real finger in the eye of radical Islam with this very high-profile conversion. Forecast: extended seething, with a 70% chance of riots. Death threat warnings are in effect.

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

An Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Catholic, Magdi Allam infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper, where he is a deputy editor. He titled one book “Long Live Israel.”

And that infuriated members of the Religion of Peace, of course, because they want to see Israel destroyed.

As a choir sang, Pope Benedict XVI poured holy water over Allam’s head and said a brief prayer in Latin. “We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another,” Benedict said in a homily reflecting on the meaning of baptism. “Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close.”

Vatican Television zoomed in on Allam, who sat in the front row of the basilica along with six other candidates for baptism. He later received his first Communion.

Allam, 55, told the newspaper Il Giornale in a December interview that his criticism of Palestinian suicide bombing provoked threats on his life in 2003, prompting the Italian government to provide him with a sizable security detail.

The Union of Islamic Communities in Italy—which Allam has frequently criticized as having links to Hamas—said the baptism was his own decision.

“He is an adult, free to make his personal choice,” the Apcom news agency quoted the group’s spokesman, Issedin El Zir, as saying.

“And we are free to kill him like the apostate he is,” Issedin El Zir didn’t say. But he didn’t have to say it. The message is clear. The ummah will take it from here.