Al-Qaeda’s second in command put out a long commercial long commercial for the Democratic Party today.
The deputy leader of al-Qaida called President Bush a failure and a liar in the war on terror in a video statement released Friday, and he compared Pope Benedict XVI to the 11th century pontiff who launched the First Crusade.
“Can’t you be honest at least once in your life, and admit that you are a deceitful liar who intentionally deceived your nation when you drove them to war in Iraq,” Ayman al-Zawahri said in a portion of the video released by the Washington-based SITE Institute.
Al-Zawahri also criticized Bush for continuing to imprison al-Qaida leaders in prisons, including al-Qaida No. 3 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. “Bush, you deceitful charlatan, 3 1/2 years have passed since your capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, so how have you found us during this time? Losing and surrendering?” he said, according to the SITE Institute.
“What you have perpetrated against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other Muslim captives in your prisons and the prisons of your slaves in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and elsewhere is not hidden from anyone, and we are a people who do not sleep under oppression and who do not abandon our revenge until our chests have been healed of those who have aggressed against us,” the Virginia-based IntelCenter quoted the message as saying. “And we, by the grace of Allah, are seeking to exact revenge on behalf of Islam and Muslims from you and your soldiers and allies.”
Al-Zawahri, the deputy to Osama bin Laden, accused the United States and its agents of torturing Muslim prisoners seized across the Middle East. “Your agents in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan have captured thousands of the youth and soldiers of Islam whom you made to taste at your hands and the hands of your agents various types of punishment and torture,” al-Zawahri said, according to the IntelCenter. “But we, by Allah’s grace, are taking revenge on their behalf daily from your troops and the troops of your allies and agents in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula and all Muslim countries from Indonesia to Morocco, and moreover, on your own soil every day.”
Aside from the part about the pope, this speech could have been given by Howard Dean, Harry Reid, or Teddy Kennedy. It’s also eerily remniscient of the video released by Osama bin Laden days before the 2004 election.
UPDATE: The post was a tongue-in-cheek reaction written hastily before I departed for an evening engagement. Obviously, there are snippets of this speech–the death to America stuff–that the Democrats wouldn’t say.
Anyone who reads this site on a regular basis knows that I’m not in the “Democrats hate America” camp. Still, it is striking how much of Zawahri’s remarks are standard talking points from the opposition party: The business about Bush being a “failure” and a “liar,” the emphasis on Abu Ghraib, Iraq as a rallying cry for Muslim outrage, and so forth.
