The American Spectator

Best Ummah source reports that the new video from bumpy Dr. Zawahri contains familiar and always revealing theology.

Dr. Z outranks the serial killing Zarqawi just because Dr. Z has intimate connection to the spiritual component of the jihad. When strongman Zarqawi speaks, it is the voice of a regional commander, exhorting, threatening, boasting, otherwise behaving like a Kubrick ape-man in the opening act of 2001.

However when Dr. Z speaks, we can hear the preacherliness of the Global Caliphate: we can hear specially the rationalizations for the murder of innocence promised ahead, like the opening chapter in Hobbitville, nightmares of the Dark Land (Tolkien: Mordor) rising.

For example, Dr. Z says that there is still time for the American public to come to its senses and reject the “butcher of Washington” George Bush and accept the Al Q offer of a truce. The Arabic word for truce is hudna, and the concept of a ten-year truce is based upon a wrenching plot twist in the peculiarly justified bloodletting spectacle that is the Koran, rated R.

Dr. Z says that if the Americans do not accept the hudna, that is, do not negotiate a peace treaty with him on his terms, then we, idiot wilderness infidel pork-eating porky children, will deserve what is going to fall on us. Then he makes his signature banal reference to attacks in America — attacks to come — and the familiar big, very big, really really big metaphorical trope about destruction, chaos, poverty, weeping, cancelled baseball seasons.

Most strangely, Dr. Z makes an exception for  the “butcher of Washington” George Bush. The president cannot, like the rest of us, merely come to his senses and move on. George Bush must convert to Islam. Critically, this is the only way George Bush can recover from his sins. Dr. Z does not say what happens after George Bush is robed, on his forehead five times a day, dutifully abusive to his four wives, deaf to his unnumbered illegitimate children and anyone else who crosses his tent flap.  (The compare and contrast game for a Wahhabist wacky and a Methodist rancher makes for a fun list.)

Dr. Z is not ungifted. He has the skill of Mordor to make each pronouncement at the same volume and tone as the last, flames roaring over his head, cacophonic Arabic woodwinds and thumping beat suggesting cobras and scorpions. In sum, he is a Hollywood villain as only the Tolkien crowd could imagine — not Sauron himself, better understood as a Deputy Dark Lord with a mechanical, compromised look to him, as if he was much too tempted by being a smarty-pants once upon a time. (OBL is what we have for Sauron: no human contact, floating between life and death, passionate only about his own martyrdom, his great eye on the Global Caliphate of 2020.)

Dr. Z needs to blog. We need to hear more of his unhappy dreamlife. He is now lost to ordinary plot summary. His villainy is on repeat. We can see that he was a careerist at some time in the near past; and that he has committed himself to this transformation as an act of will, but we cannot grasp all of his motives.  Guilt? Unpaid taxes? Dyslexia? Too short? He yearns to be timeless; instead, he might just be halfway to a predictable, wicked cartoon of another Egyptian bully.