Jonah, Jen Rubin had a very different take on this at Contentions, and she directs her remarks at President Obama’s spin on the intelligence community’s theory.

I think this is more revealing about our government than it is about al Qaeda. A few points:

1. The race obsession of the Obama administration is a sight to behold. Remember, these are people who adamantly refuse to see the Islamic underpinnings of jihadist terror, although those underpinnings are obvious and undeniable to anyone willing to look. Yet, racism, their unified field theory for interpreting all human phenomena, somehow explains al Qaeda. Sure.

2. I think all this “hearts and minds” stuff is way overdone. But if I were a believer in it, I would say that it does us no good to make stupid arguments. Al Qaeda is not a racist organization, it is an Islamist organization. The goal of Islamism is to establish a global caliphate in which all people either convert to Islam or accept the authority of the Islamic state (and, as the Koran puts it in Sura 9:29, “pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued”). Over the years, al Qaeda has shown itself willing to work with anyone who can be persuaded to support that goal — including Shiites, even though Sunnis actually do bear animus against them. Al Qaeda has never had any problem working with black people, whether in Africa, America, or anyplace else. The audience the administration is trying to reach knows that — better, apparently, than the administration does. So once again, our government ends up looking clueless.

3. Along the same lines, the president is either misstating or misunderstanding al Qaeda’s argument. As Jen relates, Obama said (in reference to the Uganda bombings), “What you’ve seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself….” Well, of course they don’t, but that has nothing to do with its being African life. Islamist groups (not just terrorist organizations but all Islamist entities) do not regard any kind of life other than one lived in accordance with sharia to be valuable in and of itself — they regard all other forms of life as an affront to Allah. They don’t care about nations or continents; it’s all about the umma, the global Muslim Nation. Ayatollah Khomeini famously said of his own country, “I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.” That’s what al Qaeda means by deriding “African life,” just like they deride every other kind of life besides sharia life.

4. I’m always fascinated by the Left’s penchant for projection. Obama faults al Qaeda’s strategy in Africa for being blindly ideological, and for being willing to sacrifice the entire African community to al Qaeda’s agenda, without any regard for the harmful “long-term consequences.” Hmmmm.