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2 Al-Qaeda message aimed at US living
rooms By Michael Scheuer
In an hour-plus videotaped interview
broadcast last Saturday, al-Qaeda deputy chief
Ayman al-Zawahiri answered questions from an
unnamed interviewer from al-Qaeda's video arm,
Al-Sahab Productions. The topics addressed covered
the range of issues usually focused on by al-Qaeda
leaders in videos, including Iraq, Afghanistan,
Palestine and most other ongoing Islamist
insurgencies.
Zawahiri also again attacked
the perfidy of Hamas and the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
for cooperating with, respectively, the Arab-state
allies of the United States - calling them US
Secretary of State "Condoleezza Rice's boys" - at
the recent Riyadh conference on Palestine and
Egyptian Hosni Mubarak's regime.
In the
video, however, Zawahiri's presentation introduces
several new elements that may portend an
increasing al-Qaeda effort to make itself part of
domestic US politics and to appeal to the
religious sentiments and societal and economic
dissatisfactions of American Muslims, especially
black Muslims.
The new video maintains the
high tempo of Zawahiri's media appearances in
2007. Zawahiri's May 5 appearance is his seventh
of the year, of which two have been on videotape
and five on audio. Overall, Al-Sahab media
organization has released 35 videotapes in 2007,
which is a rate of one video every 3.6 days. [1]
The frequency with which these al-Qaeda
media products are released, as well as their
professional production values, strongly suggests
that Al-Sahab is headquartered in an area where
its employees have easy access to high-quality
media gear and which has been reliably secured
against intrusions by al-Qaeda's enemies.
Al-Qaeda has previously tried to impact US
domestic politics through its video and audio
tapes. Osama bin Laden's "Speech to the American
People" on the eve of the 2004 presidential
election is perhaps the most famous of these
efforts (Al-Jazeera, October 30, 2004).
Zawahiri's May 5 statements, however, were
much more specifically targeted than bin Laden's
message, and were meant to inflame further the
ongoing confrontation between President George W
Bush's administration and the
Democratic-controlled Congress over the future of
the Iraq war.
In response to the
interviewer's request for his views on the Iraq
war funding bill, which includes a withdrawal
timetable for US forces, Zawahiri replied that the
measure "reflects Americans' failure and
frustrations" and added that the US failure is
allowing the mujahideen to move "from the stage of
defeat of the Crusader ... to the stage of
consolidating a Mujahid Islamic Emirate [in Iraq]
which will liberate the homelands of Islam,
protect the sacred things [sites] of Muslims,
implement the rules of sharia ... and raise the
banner of jihad as it makes its way through a
rugged path of sacrifice and giving toward the
environs of Jerusalem, with Allah's permission".
While accurately reflecting al-Qaeda's
goals, Zawahiri's words were likely meant to
provide quality fodder for those in US politics
who argue that the Iraq war must be won to prevent
the rise of a new Islamic caliphate that will be
ruled by a doctrine of "Islamofascism" and
threaten the United States and Israel.
For
US politicians opposed to the war, Zawahiri
offered grist of a similar quality. When asked
about his view of the US troop surge in Baghdad
and those who claim it is beginning to bear fruit,
al-Qaeda's No 2 claimed that the surge certainly
is "bearing fruit", but only in Bush's "pockets
and the pockets of Halliburton".
Then,
turning to ridicule claims of the surge's success,
Zawahiri invited the US president to join him "for
a glass of juice ... in the cafeteria of the Iraqi
Parliament in the middle of the Green Zone" -
referring to the deadly insurgent attack on that
heavily defended site last month. Finally,
Zawahiri expressed some mock anguish over what he
sees as a too-early US withdrawal from Iraq.
Such an action, he said, "Will deprive us
of the opportunity to destroy the American forces
which we have caught in a historic trap. We ask
Allah that they only get out of it after losing
two or three hundred thousand killed." Citing the
supposed greed of US war industries, focusing on
the US-led coalition's inability to protect
facilities in the Green Zone, and displaying
zealousness to kill many more US troops, Zawahiri
provided ammunition to those in US politics who
argue that the war is being lost, too many
Americans have already died, and only war
profiteers have an interest in staying the course
in Iraq.
Zawahiri's May 5 statements
greatly expanded previous al-Qaeda efforts to
portray the Islamist movement as part of a world
liberation campaign that is meant to destroy US
imperialism - "the most powerful tyrannical force
in the history of mankind" - and assist "all the
weak and oppressed in North America and South
America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the
world". [2]
Al-Qaeda wants all people to
know, Zawahiri said, "that when we wage jihad in
Allah's path, we aren't waging jihad to lift
oppression from Muslims only; we are waging jihad
to lift oppression from all mankind, because Allah
has ordered us never to accept oppression,
wherever it may be". He concluded this part of the
interview by inviting "all the world's weak and
oppressed ones to Islam, the religion of freedom
and rejection of tyranny, the religion which ...
produced the 19 martyrs [of September 11, 2001],
who demolished the symbol of America's arrogance".
Beyond this expansion, Zawahiri clearly
sought to begin a process of sowing political and
racial discontent among American
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