WASHINGTON - Soon after the November election, al-Qaida's No. 2 leader took stock of America's new president-elect and dismissed him with an insulting epithet. "A house Negro," Ayman al-Zawahiri said.
That was just a warm-up. In the weeks since, the terrorist group has unleashed a stream of verbal tirades against Barack Obama, each more venomous than the last. Obama has been called a "hypocrite," a "killer" of innocents, an "enemy of Muslims." He was even blamed for the Israeli military assault on Gaza, which began and ended before he took office.
"He kills your brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection," an al-Qaida spokesman declared in a grainy Internet video this month.
The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaida's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaida of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.
With Obama, al-Qaida faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close Guantanamo Bay's detention camps, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.
Whether the pro-Obama sentiment will last remains to be seen. On Friday, the new administration signaled that it intends to continue at least one of Bush's controversial counterterrorism policies: allowing CIA missile strikes on alleged terrorist hideouts in Pakistan's autonomous tribal region.
But for now, the change in Washington appears to have rattled al-Qaida's leaders, some of whom are scrambling to convince the faithful that Obama and Bush are essentially the same.
"They're highly uncertain about what they're getting in this new adversary," said Paul Pillar, a former CIA counterterrorism official who lectures on national security at Georgetown University. "For al-Qaida, as a matter of image and tone, George W. Bush had been a near-perfect foil."
Al-Qaida's rhetorical swipes at Obama date to the weeks before the election, when commentators on Web sites associated with the group debated which of the two major presidential candidates would be better for the jihadist movement. A consensus view supported Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona as the man most likely to continue Bush administration policies and, it was hoped, drive the United States more deeply into a prolonged guerrilla war.
