Declaring Jihad On “Uncle Tom”

It did not pass by unnoticed to me this week when, even before Barack Obama was inaugurated to office, Al Qaeda had produced a video denouncing him. However, it is the way that they denounced him that is most interesting because the simple fact that Al Qaeda denounces United States’ presidents is a well-known fact. In fact, the line of attack Ayman Al-Zawahiri used was rather fascinating.

Ayman Al-Zawahiri took to the videotapes (where he is at he can no longer take to the airwaves so he takes to VHS and cassette tape when he feels it sufficiently important, VHS when it is very important) to denounce Barack Obama as what best translates into American slang as an “Uncle Tom” or “house slave.” Those are some pretty heavy words from the Z-Man so he must be pretty disturbed about Obama’s election to the White House. He is and his specific criticism reveals precisely why.

Al Qaeda, for as long as it has been around, has been about terrorism as a means to fight colonialism, imperialism and all the other “-isms” that emanate from America, Israel and Western Europe but, particularly since 9/11, mostly from America. Al Qaeda thrives when the Islamic populace perceives a boot upon its neck because that is when Islam sends its sons to jihad with Osama and Co. With a groundbreaking election in the United States, Al Qaeda’s entire operating equation changed.

To us here in the United States, we elected a black man to the White House which was historic in its own right. However, things look much different outside the United States. Heretofore, Al Qaeda could count on cultural differences to work in their favor. “Look!” they would tell young Muslim men in madrassas “There is that white man Bush who is leader of the imperialists in Iraq and Afghanistan that look just like him!” The madrassa in Pakistan is to Al Qaeda what Parris Island, South Carolina is to the United States Marine Corps: where they train their soldiers. As any good general knows, to fight an effective campaign you must define your enemy to your men not as human but as inhuman, as the “other.” There are different strategies of doing this and Al Qaeda uses the strategy that identifies every American as a representative of a foreign culture trying to crush Islam into dust, urging on their young warriors to their hopeless, but well-covered by the media, deaths. They had a good thing going until November 4 because the head looked just like the beast they were describing to their young charges.

On November 4, to the most world press coverage in history, a black man whose father was from Kenya (where Islam thrives) was elected the president of the United States and created the greatest paradigm shift by a president elect since Reagan’s 1980 election announced that America was no longer the loser it was in Vietnam, it would not be playing softball on the weekends with the Soviet Union at the SALT II treaty summits and we were not going to surrender another inch in the Cold War. Electing Barack Hussein Obama (and after the campaign, they all know his middle name is Hussein) took Al Qaeda’s square peg and pneumatic hammered it through a round hole. They can no longer point to a white man and say “There is the enemy boys, go on jihad against him!” They have to point to a man with the same or darker skin color as these young men, whose father’s family hailed from an Islamic land, whose name is BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA and then say “There’s the enemy boys, go on jihad against him!” That’s tantamount to telling them to go on jihad against themselves because Obama is far more similar to them than Bush was different. The President of the United States is no longer a recruitment tool for Al Qaeda, he is a strategic problem of monumental proportions.

Here is this man who looks like them, has a name like them and is selling hope to everyone on the globe and they have to dehumanize that? That is a tall order which calls for soaring (or lower than the gutter) rhetoric. Thus, Ayman Al-Zawahiri took to his VHS tapes this week to call Obama the ultimate “Uncle Tom.” If we apply what we know as Americans about the term, we’ll see what Zawahiri was saying. He was saying that Obama is nothing but a house slave to the departing Bush, a caricature saying “yessa massa” to the white overlords behind the scenes that are telling him what to do, essentially that he is part of this white imperialist cabal while wearing the skin of a black man. He is not similar to you, Zawahiri was saying to them, he is as much an infidel as George Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, or Mikhail Gorbachev… all of whom Al Qaeda has previously went to war with and had varying amounts of success.

What are Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s nightmares made of now? Primarily that his chief recruitment base will look at Obama, listen to his “Only in America could my story be possible” narrative and then decide that instead of sending their son on jihad they would rather send him to Harvard and pray to Allah that their line produces a leader of the free world like Barack Obama Sr’s line did. That young Muslims abroad will look at Obama, how he assimilated into Western culture and want to be like him rather than bring harm to him. That Obama’s offer of hope, change and the interwoven story of immigrants coming to America to make it big will seduce his recruits away from sleeper cells in America and Europe and towards the mainstream of the country they live in. Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s greatest and most disturbing fear is that young Muslim men no longer want to become Osama, they want to become Obama.

This is his greatest nightmare because it is the beginning of modernization in Islam. Males aren’t hostile towards foreign cultures and religions. Females have the right to go bareheaded and drive and move in the street unaccompanied by a male relative. Some of the most adventurous Muslims might marry Christians or, God forbid, Jews and not be killed by religious enforcers because there will no longer be religious enforcers. It would be the unraveling of Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s entire world, belief system and life’s work in front of his eyes in but a few short years. That is what sent him racing through his knowledge of American culture for a way to discredit Barack Obama to his acolytes in the most petty and inglorious way possible, because as soon as they want to become Obama instead of Osama, Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s life is over.