March 24, 2008

Al Qaeda #2: Kill the Jews & Americans Everywhere

A new audio message from Ayman al Zawahiri in which he declares open war against America and Jews everywhere. Which, er, isn't really news since al Qaeda declared this, what, 10 years ago?

Only two things interesting in the audio. Al Qaeda urges Muslims to organize themselves into terror groups and strike American interests. Interesting that al Qaeda itself is no longer able to do the organizing, isn't it? I'll save the second interesting tidbit for after the quote. NEFA has the entire thing translated already:

attack the interests of the Jews and the American... Select your targets, collect the appropriate funds, assemble your equipment, plan [your attacks] accurately, and then charge towards your targets... There is no place today for those who claim that the battlefield with the Jews is limited to Palestine... Let us hit their interests everywhere."

Ed thinks that the “urgent tone” might indicate new attacks are on the way. I don't think so. If anything, the audio indicates that al Qaeda's capacity to organize large scale attacks is gone. They have moved from organizing to inspiring. Quite a difference in my humble opinion.

Oops, thanks to Jimbo.

UPDATE: Laura Mansfield notices another difference:

For several years now, even audio messages from Al Qaeda have been made into videos, with still images of the speaker. The significance (if it is in fact significant) of this deviation from normal operations is not known.

Today's video was released in MP3 format with Arabic transcript. No video
file was released.

PS: Vacation is over but still have relatives in town so posting, for my part, will probably be light. If you've e-mailed over the past week and I haven't responded, I'm sorry. I'll try to get around to answering in the next few days.