Zawahiri does Palestinian rant

CNN:

A new statement attributed to al Qaeda's No. 2 figure, Ayman al-Zawahiri, calls on Muslims to attack Western interests in defense of the Palestinians in Gaza.

"Let us strike their interests everywhere, just as they gathered against us from everywhere, and let them know that every dollar they spend on the killing of Muslims, there will be shed blood instead in return," the speaker in the nearly five-minute statement says.

The identity of the speaker could not be independently verified.

The audio statement was posted on radical Islamist Web sites Sunday evening, and gave little indication when it was produced. Its release follows a similar statement last week from Osama bin Laden, who called on Muslims to rise up and "liberate" the Palestinian territory of Gaza from Israeli sanctions and raids against its Hamas-led government.

The speaker urges Muslims to take action rather than hold protests in support of the Palestinians, which he says will do no good.

"If you let the people of Gaza be killed today, while you shout and demonstrate, tomorrow the events will turn around and the Crusaders and the Jews will kill you instead, and others will do nothing but shout back and demonstrate," he says.

...

The statement from al-Zawahiri, who led an Egyptian Islamic militant group that joined forces with bin Laden in the 1990s, also criticized the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for cooperating with the Israeli effort to sanction Hamas.

"The plot was well-planned against Gaza. The bombs of the Jews are over the heads of its people, the Israeli tanks are aiming at their chests and the Egyptian borders guards and security officers are aiming at their backs, preventing any kind of supplies to them, narrowing the routes to their food supplies and medication, preventing help to reach them and prohibiting them from evacuating their injured and protecting their families, locking them down from the south and the west so that the Jews take their full opportunity to kill and imprison whoever they wish and to destroy whatever they want," the speaker says.

Zawahiri sounds incoherent in this rant. Its production quality and the poor quality of bin Laden's latest cowardly rant suggest that they have lost some of their audio visual team. there have been rumors that the American traitor was killed in one of the recent strikes in Pakistan. If so that could account for the poor production qualities.

It is also clear that the duo have decided that the Palestinians should be their new pawns in their war with the world. They are running out of jihadis for the Iraq operation and appear to be urging Palestinians to step into the void. So far, Palestinians have tried to keep their war local and not provoke outside powers like the US who supply them with a significant portion of their funding. Since they are basically a beggar culture they cannot afford to make none Israelis too angry.

I think this is another sign of the deterioration of al Qaeda as a result of its losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite all the whining from Democrats the Bush administration has done a good job of fighting terrorism around the world and discrediting the al Qaeda brand. We have also made significant progress against the narco terrorist FARC organization in our war on terror.