Fifth Edition of Inspire Magazine: Still Inspiring

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s media wing released the fifth edition of Inspire Magazine, which focuses on the revolutions in the Middle East. Some observations about this issue:

First, Al Qaeda is asking and answering the same question that Western authorities and experts are debating: Are the revolts good or bad for Al Qaeda? The editorial piece is quick to say that even though the West thinks the current situation in the Middle East is bad for Al Qaeda (do we really??), Al Qaeda itself does not think this is bad for them. In fact, the editorial says, regime change through protest is a good idea, BUT they are “against the idea that the change should be only through peaceful means to the exclusion of the use of force.” There you go -- Al Qaeda approves of the peaceful protests, proving they care about the people, while at the same time still not criticizing the message inherent to their ideology, i.e. promoting violence.

This edition, like the previous ones, discourages Westerners from making hijrah and instead encourages supporters to stay in the West and carry out attacks. This is one of Al Qaeda’s biggest challenges right now - trying to convince Westerners to join them in spirit, but not physically. The whole purpose of Inspire is to give Westerners the tools they need to overcome their insecurities and empower them to become terrorists on their own. In a question and answer section, AQAP says:

As usual, this edition of Inspire takes a gamified approach. What I mean by that is they take game-like qualities and apply it to their magazine, which allays the seriousness of what Al Qaeda is really telling its readers to do, blurring the barriers between fake and real. Past editions, for instance, assigned readers gimmicky-sounding tasks, such as "make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom" and “pull off Mumbai [attack] near White House till martyrdom.” In this edition, Al Qaeda makes their effort even more evident in the article “The Clown of the Tawaghit.”  The image speaks for itself:

This issue of Inspire has a few differences from the pervious editions. Most notably, they responded to emailed questions and announced that Anwar al-Awlaki will hold an exclusive video interview to answer more questions. I bet this works better than Ayman al-Zawahiri’s attempt a few years ago - more on that in a later post.

The other difference is that there is no list of Muslim prisoners at the end of the magazine. In all four previous issues, Inspire listed between 20-30 names of prisoners they prayed would be released. Just last week someone mentioned to me how interesting it would be to compare these names and analyze where the names are placed in the list. For some reason they left out the list of prisoners in this edition. Maybe they were busy getting the graphics so perfect that they forgot about the list...??