Al Qaeda greets election of Obama with insults

Says he would continue effort against Islam

This image shows a video still Al Qaeda released yesterday. The message juxtaposes a picture of Barack Obama in a yarmulke in Jerusalem with a photo of Malcolm X kneeling at a mosque. (IntelCenter)

WASHINGTON - In a propaganda salvo by Al Qaeda aimed at undercutting the enthusiasm of Muslims worldwide about the US presidential 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 yesterday 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 Bush as the leading American "crusader" against Muslim nations. The election of Obama, a black man whose father was from a Muslim family and who himself spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, has muddied Al Qaeda's message.

The Qaeda leader described the victory by Obama, who has called for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, as the American people's "admission of defeat in Iraq." But he warned 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 that country to carry on the fight against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies.

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

The Qaeda video, provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant websites, drew extensively on archival footage of Malcolm X, and much of the message juxtaposes a still picture of Obama wearing a yarmulke during a visit to the Western 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," 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 Zawahri, an Egyptian physician who has long been Al Qaeda's second-ranking operative, contains no specific warning of an attack against the United States. But the Qaeda leader 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."

US officials said they believed the video was authentic.

US anti-terrorism officials and other experts dismissed the new video as a desperate tactic by a terrorist group that suffered a defeat in the global war of ideas with Obama's election.

Lawrence Wright, the author of a book on Al Qaeda, "The Looming Tower," called the tape an attempt by Al Qaeda at "spin control" as it struggles to assimilate an election that challenges its worldview.

For more than a year, 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.

Wright said that Qaeda leaders may have seen a Pew Research Center poll last year showing African-American Muslims are the subset of American Muslims least hostile to Al Qaeda.

The poll showed that 63 percent of foreign-born Muslims in the United States had a "very unfavorable" view of Al Qaeda, compared with 36 percent of African-American Muslims.

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

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 Obama. "On 9/11, Al Qaeda didn't make any racial distinctions in who it killed, and people remember that."