OP-ED: Sign of Desperation (Globe and Mail, CANADA)

Make no mistake: Al-Qaeda's leadership is scared of Barack Obama.

A year ago, the Anglo-American pundit Andrew Sullivan suggested in The Atlantic Monthly that his readers “consider this hypothetical. It's November, 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man – Barack Hussein Obama – is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.” Judging by this week's video message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda terror group's second-in-command, the extremists of the world have caught on to this possibility.

Mr. al-Zawahiri's ludicrous characterization of Mr. Obama as a “house negro” (interspersed helpfully with clips of the African-American activist Malcolm X) demonstrates just how out of touch his organization is with American reality, and the desperation of a terrorist outfit that has lately produced plenty of bark, but very little bite. Make no mistake: Al-Qaeda's leadership is scared of Barack Hussein Obama.

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