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| Home Front: Politix |
| Al Qaeda Misses Bush - Insults Obama |
| 2009-01-25 |
| Soon after the November election, al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader took stock of America's new president-elect and dismissed him with an insulting epithet. "A house Negro," Ayman al-Zawahiri said. That was just a warm-up. In the weeks since, the terrorist group has unleashed a stream of verbal tirades against Barack Obama, each more venomous than the last. Obama has been called a "hypocrite," a "killer" of innocents, an "enemy of Muslims." He was even blamed for the Israeli military assault on Gaza, which began and ended before he took office. "He kills your brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection," an al-Qaeda spokesman declared in a grainy Internet video this month. The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group. So Obama scares them because he's not Bush? With Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world. Whether the pro-Obama sentiment will last remains to be seen. On Friday, the new administration signaled that it intends to continue at least one of Bush's controversial counterterrorism policies: allowing CIA missile strikes on alleged terrorist hideouts in Pakistan's autonomous tribal region. But for now, the change in Washington appears to have rattled al-Qaeda's leaders, some of whom are scrambling to convince the faithful that Obama and Bush are essentially the same. Talk about cognative dissonance! "They're highly uncertain about what they're getting in this new adversary," said Paul Pillar, a former CIA counterterrorism official who lectures on national security at Georgetown University. "For al-Qaeda, as a matter of image and tone, George W. Bush had been a near-perfect foil." So the WaPo has found something Bush was good at. Al-Qaeda's rhetorical swipes at Obama date to the weeks before the election, when commentators on Web sites associated with the group debated which of the two major presidential candidates would be better for the jihadist movement. While opinions differed, a consensus view supported Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) as the man most likely to continue Bush administration policies and, it was hoped, drive the United States more deeply into a prolonged guerrilla war. Clearly, they're not worried about Obama doing that. So what's wrong with him surrendering? |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #5 ION AQ, ISRAELI MILITARY FORUM > GERMANY THREATENED BY AL QAEDA [threats of attack agz major German cities e.g. Cologne, Bremen, Berlin, etc. in retaliation for German troops in Afghanistan]??? |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2009-01-25 22:49 |
| #4 This is not helpful. If they continue this, they will NOT get their share of the stimulus package. |
| Posted by: BH Obama 2009-01-25 21:41 |
| #3 George W. Bush, honored enemy. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2009-01-25 17:50 |
| #2 where is all the bitching about al zwahiri being racist for calling obama a house negro? |
| Posted by: rabid whitetail 2009-01-25 17:17 |
| #1 And all this time Hussein told me he was the the change they were waiting for. I feel so ... let down. |
| Posted by: ed 2009-01-25 15:38 |