[Reader-list] Al Qaeda Offers Obama Insults and a Warning: NY Times

[taraprakash]

Al Qaeda Offers Obama Insults and a Warning. 
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE. WASHINGTON. In a propaganda salvo by Al Qaeda aimed at undercutting the enthusiasm of Muslims worldwide about the American election, Osama bin Laden's top deputy condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a 'house Negro' who would continue a campaign against Islam that Al Qaeda's leaders said was begun by President Bush. 

Appealing to the 'weak and oppressed' around the world, the Qaeda deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, said in a video released Wednesday that the 'new face' of America only masked a 'heart full of hate. 

For years, the terrorist network sought to fuel anti-Americanism with prolific audio and video recordings vilifying President Bush as the leading American 'crusader' against Muslim nations. The election of Mr. Obama, a black man who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and whose father was from a Muslim family, has muddied Al Qaeda's message. 

The Qaeda leader described the victory by Mr. Obama, who has called for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, as the American people's 'admission of defeat in Iraq. But he warned Mr. Obama that the United States risked a reprise of the Soviet Union's failures in Afghanistan if the president-elect followed through on pledges to deploy thousands more troops to Afghanistan to carry on the fight against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. 

And in a blunt personal attack on the incoming president, Mr. Zawahri painted Mr. Obama as a hypocrite and a traitor to his race, comparing him unfavorably with 'honorable black Americans' like Malcolm X, the 1960s black Muslim leader. 

The Qaeda video, provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant Web sites, drew extensively on archival film of Malcolm X, and much of the message juxtaposes a still picture of Mr. Obama wearing a yarmulke during a visit to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem with a photo of Malcolm X kneeling in prayer at a mosque. 

The video shows Malcolm X speaking about the docile 'house Negro,' who he said 'always looked out for his master,' and the 'field Negro,' who was abused by whites and was more rebellious. The video also insulted two prominent black diplomats, the former and current secretaries of state, Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice. 

And in you and in Colin Powell, Rice and your likes, the words of Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him) concerning 'house Negroes' are confirmed,' Mr. Zawahri said, according to an English-language transcript, which SITE says was provided by As-Sahab, a Qaeda media outlet that produced the video. In the original Arabic, according to SITE, the words used are 'house slave. 

The video by Mr. Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor who has long been Al Qaeda's second-ranking operative, contains no specific warning of an attack against the United States. But he tells his followers that America 'continues to be the same as ever, so we must continue to harm it, in order for it to come to its senses. 

American officials said they believed that the video was authentic. 

American antiterrorism officials and other experts dismissed the video as a desperate tactic by a terrorist group that suffered a defeat in the global war of ideas with Mr. Obama's election. 

Lawrence Wright, the author of a book on Al Qaeda, 'The Looming Tower,' called the tape an attempt at 'spin control' as Al Qaeda struggled to assimilate an election that challenged its worldview. 

Mr. Wright said both radical and mainstream Muslim commentators had predicted that Senator John McCain would win the presidential election and that little would change. 

For more than a year, Mr. Wright said, messages from Qaeda leaders have included positive messages about Malcolm X in what he described as 'a desperate and ineffective strategy' to appeal to African-American Muslims. 

Mr. Wright said that Qaeda leaders might have seen a Pew Research Center poll last year showing that African-American Muslims were the subset of American Muslims least hostile to Al Qaeda. The poll showed that 63 percent of foreign-born Muslims in this country had a 'very unfavorable' view of Al Qaeda, compared with 36 percent of African-American Muslims. 

The high quality of the English subtitles and the references to Malcolm X in the tape may reflect the influence of Adam Gadahn, an American-born Qaeda spokesman who has appeared in past As-Sahab productions under the name 'Azzam the American. 

Ronald Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, said he wondered whether Al Qaeda was responding to the aggressive tone of Mr. Obama's campaign pledges to go after the terrorist network and capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. 

Dr. Walters said that if the tape was an attempt to reach black Americans or the third world, it was 'ham handed' and futile. 

You're talking about someone who looks like the rest of the world, and that's got to be threatening to them,' he said, referring to Mr. Obama. On 9/11, Al Qaeda didn't make any racial distinctions in who it killed, and people remember that.