Al-Qaeda’s New Weapon « NewsReal Blog

Al-Qaeda’s New Weapon « NewsReal Blog: "Following Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas, last week, pundits advanced all sorts of theories as to how a member of the U.S. armed forces could have possibly been so influenced by al-Qaeda’s image of Islam that he took up arms against fellow soldiers. It soon became known that Hasan received inspiration (and e-mail instructions) from a charismatic al-Qaeda-linked cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki, currently in hiding in Yemen, whose sermons were readily available on militant web sites.

Unlike those terrorists currently in detention in Guantanamo and elsewhere, there are two key points in Hasan’s background that set him apart: 1) Hasan (as far as we know) never left the U.S. to have direct contact with any militant group; and, 2) Hasan does not speak Arabic. It is this second point, which leads us to a troubling development, that will be taken up here.

In the early days following the 9/11 terror attacks, any communications attributed to either Osama bin-Laden, al-Qaeda’s head, or his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were either grainy video footage or audio tapes sent by foot courier to sympathetic media outlets such as al-Jazeera. Militant websites were amateurish and generally short-lived. What they had in common, however, was that they were all exclusively presented in Arabic. English translations, usually provided as an afterthought by non-native speakers, were crude and unsophisticated.

A cleric’s sermon, delivered in Arabic with the aim of calling the faithful to Jihad would have been useless to somebody like Hasan, as he wouldn’t have been able to understand a word of it. Lately, however, this has changed, and al-Qaeda has begun to utilize a potent new weapon in its efforts at spreading radical Islam’s message to Muslims in the West: the English language."