Saturday, November 29, 2008

Zawahiri continues pontificating, predicting, and predicating

Evidencing that al-Qaeda's Internet problems have been, at least for now, solved. "Zawahiri blames global financial crisis on 9/11 in latest al-Qaeda video," by Ben Farmer for the Telegraph, November 28: Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has said in a new internet video that the international financial crisis is the result of a US war on Muslims and the Sept 11 attacks.

A common theme of al-Qaeda, one that goes back to the Soviet-Afghan war.

Zawahiri also claimed the recent security gains made by US forces in Iraq were only temporary and Afghan President Hamid Karzai's offers to negotiate with Taliban elements were a sign of his regime's weakness.

The comments in a new internet video come a week after Zawahiri compared US President-Elect Barack Obama to a "house negro" implying he did the bidding of whites.

The video, "Al-Azhar – The Lions' Den", was posted on jihadist websites earlier this week according to the SITE intelligence group, which monitors online Islamist militant propaganda.

Zawahiri said: "This crisis is one of ... the series of American economic haemorrhages after the strikes of September 11... And these ... will continue as long as the foolish American policy of wading in Muslim blood continues."

"The ones shouldering the burden are taxpayers, whose money was spent to rescue senior capitalists and to protect the fraudulent interest-based system from collapse."

The Egyptian militant claimed the US was doomed to failure in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of northern Pakistan and had been exaggerating its successes.

"I challenge you [US President George W Bush], if you are really a man, to send the entire American army to Pakistan and the tribal regions for it to end up in hell," he said.

In Iraq, he predicted US gains were temporary and the country's Sunni Awakening Councils of former insurgents who have been credited with stemming the country's bloodshed, would not be accepted by the Shiite majority government.

He also called on Egyptians to hold a general strike to pressure the Government to open the Gaza border to defeat an Israeli siege of the area ruled by militant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

"What is the problem if students, employees and workers were to refuse to study and work until the siege is lifted on Gaza?" he said.

"Are we unable to carry out such a peaceful strike?"

The 57-year-old fugitive is Osama bin Laden's most senior lieutenant and has a $25 million US government bounty on his head for involvement in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa.

During the 80-minute video he made no reference to the recent terrorist attacks in Bombay.

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