Here It Comes--An Invitation for Americans to Convert to Islam

Al Qaeda No. 2 Releases Tape Inviting Americans to Convert to Islam Saturday

September 02, 2006

CAIRO, Egypt— Al Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a new videotape Saturday along with a man identified as an American member of the terror network, inviting Americans to convert to Islam.

The 41-minute video, posted on an Islamic militant Web site nine days before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, had footage of al-Zawahri and a man the video identified as Adam Yehiye Gadahn, an American who the FBI believes attended Al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan and served as an Al Qaeda translator. Gadahn and al-Zawahiri did not appear together in the footage but were each featured on a split screen. Both wore white turbans and robes.

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It was the second time Gadahn has appeared in the same video with al-Zawahiri. In a July 7 video marking the one-year anniversary of bombings against the London transit system, Gadahn said no Muslim should "shed tears" for Westerners killed by Al Qaeda attacks.

"To the American people and the people of the West in general ... God sent his Prophet Muhammad with guidance and the religion of truth ... and sent him as a herald," al-Zawahiri said in an introduction to Saturday's video.

Gadahn spoke with his face uncovered, resembling FBI photos, with his name and nom de guerre — "Azzam the American" — written in titles in Arabic and English next to him.

"We invite all Americans and unbelievers to Islam," Gadahn said, sporting a long, thick black beard with a computer terminal in the background.

Gadahn, a 28-year-old from California who converted to Islam, is wanted by the FBI in connection with possible terrorist threats against the United States, though the agency says it has no information linking him to any specific terrorist activities.

Gadahn spoke for much of the video, saying he wanted to correct the image Americans have of Islam.

He described the West as "the civilization which enslaved Africa, slaughtered native Americans, fired bombs at ... Tokyo and (the Iraqi city of) Fallujah and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

He said America shows more concern for archaeological sites, like statues of Bhudda destroyed by Afghanistan's former Taliban rulers, "than it shows of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq."

He said "ignorance" of Islam "causes the people of the West to rapturously applaud when Israel perpetrates wholesale slaughter of Muslims in Lebanon and Palestine and leads them to give their consent to the atrocities that governments commit in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world."

The video, issued by Al Qaeda's production wing As-Sahab, had been advertised on militant Web sites for several days before it appeared Saturday.

Besides the July 7 video, Gadahn is believed to be a masked figure who appeared in two previous videos not officially from Al Qaeda, given to ABC News in Pakistan in 2004 and a few days before Sept. 11, 2005.

In the 2005 tape, the speaker threatened new terror attacks in Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia. The 2004 tape praised the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings and said a new wave of attacks could come at any moment.