Zawahiri's desperate diss
IN HIS latest blustering audio tape, Osama bin Laden's chief strategist, Ayman al-Zawahiri, vilified President-elect Barack Obama. The Egyptian's invective revealed important things about him and about the anxiety of Al Qaeda honchos as they contemplate the worldwide enthusiasm greeting Obama's election as well as the ignominious defeat of Al Qaeda's affiliates in Iraq.
Zawahiri clearly does not understand what Obama's election means. As an avowed enemy of democracy, the terrorist cannot fathom the choice Obama presented to voters or the choice they made.
Indifferent to contradiction, Zawahiri asserted that Obama's victory means America has accepted defeat in Iraq but also that nothing has changed in the "American Crusade" against Islam. This is a transparent attempt to hide a humiliating truth from would-be recruits in the Muslim world and, simultaneously, to justify Al Qaeda's increasingly discredited holy war against both the "far enemy" in Washington and all Muslims who reject the terrorists' worldview.
The humiliating truth is that Al Qaeda made itself despised in Iraq and was defeated there by other Muslims. The whole world saw Muslims in Iraq stop fighting the Americans so they could crush the Al Qaeda serpent in their midst.
To the American ear, the falsest note struck by Zawahiri came in this direct address to Obama: "And in you and in Colin Powell, Rice and your likes, the words of Malcolm X concerning 'house negroes' are confirmed." This was not only a nasty, racist insult of Obama (the original Arabic called him a "house slave"); it showed a willful misunderstanding both of Obama's mandate for the rehabilitation of America and of Malcolm's rejection, near the end of his life, of the delusional, hate-based nihilism that Al Qaeda practices. 