'Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom': Al-Qaeda's Official English-Language Magazine
Al-Qaeda is publishing an English-language magazine. It's called Inspire and it features such articles as "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom" and "What to Expect in Jihad." Want to read some of it?
And they said the magazine industry was dead! Well, they must have meant only the decadent, Godless, Western magazine industry, because al-Qaeda's bold new English-language venture, Inspire, hit the internet on Wednesday. (Sort of. Apparently, only the first three pages were available, and the other 64 "were just garbled computer code." Good job, guys.)
So, what's the al-Qaeda editorial strategy? Service journalism, of course (it's 2010, for God's sake; magazines don't sell themselves). Inspire, published by the terrorist group's Yemen franchise, offers up how-tos ("Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," which is "a detailed yet short, easy-to-read manual on how to make a bomb using ingredients found in a kitchen"), guides ("What to Expect in Jihad") and listicles ("6 Calls of al-Anfal"). There is even an "exclusive interview," with Shaykh Abu Basir, the leader of al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, and regular columns, including (excuse me while I LOL) something called "Open Source Jihad." These guys should buy Newsweek!
Lloyd Grove, writing in The Daily Beast, says that "American officials are deeply concerned," I guess because some poor idiot hick might read an Islamist listicle and join up, or maybe because they think it'll put The Nation out of business. (Don't they know that no one reads magazines anymore?) Marc Ambinder has the non-screwed-up pages, so you can judge for yourself: