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Al-Qaida Trash-Talks Obama

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The Washington Post

Published: January 26, 2009

WASHINGTON - Soon after the November election, al-Qaida'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 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.

The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now think is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaida's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaida of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.

With Obama, al-Qaida faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close Guantanamo Bay's detention camps, and who polls show is well-liked throughout the Muslim world.

The change in Washington appears to have rattled al-Qaida's leaders, some of whom are scrambling to persuade the faithful that Obama and Bush are essentially the same.

Al-Qaida'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 presidential candidates would be better for the jihadist movement.

Soon after the vote, the attacks turned personal - and insulting. In his Nov. 16 video message, Zawahiri denounced Obama as "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" such as Malcolm X. He then used the term "house Negro," implying that Obama is merely a servant carrying out the orders of powerful whites.

Since then, as Obama has begun moving to reverse controversial Bush administration policies, the verbal attacks have become sharper, more frequent and more clearly aimed at Muslim audiences.

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