No, I do not believe that the magazine “Inspire” is real.  How can it be?  Nobody puts out an article entitled “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” — do they?  Then again, there might be cultural differences I don’t understand regarding the pscyhotic.

The magazine itself has a hefty feature well, reports The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, consistent with what any ambitious editor would want to see in a roll-out issue.  Osama bin Laden himself offers his thoughts on “How to Save the World”: Blow stuff up when people disagree with you about what’s Islamic! His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, shares his insights on what’s going down in Yemen.

But the anchor is a message from Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born preacher who’s become al-Qaida’s biggest draw as an online propagandist. So much so that the Obama administration reserves unto itself the right to kill Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, without due process of law.

And then there are some promising front-of-the-book experiments. “What to Expect in Jihad” is self-explanatory. “The AQ Chef” gives you a step-by-step on how to “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” And that threads the needle for the apparent purpose of launching Inspire: getting frustrated Muslim youth to buy into al-Qaida’s holistic conspiracy theory that the crises of the modern era are attributable to a nefarious American-Jewish alliance against True Islam, and then giving them the tools to murder people.

 

The twist is to get Muslims living in America and other Western countries to subscribe — Najibullah Zazi, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (educated in Britain), Faisal Shahzad, Major Nidal Malik Hasan — in order to send the message that nowhere is safe for the Americans. That’s a huge, preoccupying concern for John Brennan and the rest of the Obama counterterrorism team. […]

Which makes Inspire look anomalous. It’s not, apparently, online yet. Ambinder reports that a virus corrupted an attempted upload on extremist websites on Wednesday. And it’s not apparently an as-Sahab product: It bears a banner of al-Malahem Media, the publishing arm of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, a franchise of al-Qaida that trained Abdulmutallab on putting bombs in his underwear. And that’s even more fishy: Al-Jazeera’s Gregg Carlstrom tweets that it’s not al-Malahem’s typical logo.

“It is difficult at this point to confirm its authenticity,” says Marc Lynch, a George Washington University political science professor who specializes in Arabic-language media.

It’s a Print Magazine that is going to be distributed in the United States — how?  Subscription service is pretty easily:  Heavily vetted in a plain brown paper bag and a generic company name, like pornographic and sex toy companies? deal with their mailings.  I imagine any subscribers would be hauled off to Gitmo in, like, 5 minutes upon delivery.

In other words, don’t cancel your subscription to Technical Mujahid just yet. That magazine, at least, is not afraid to be service-y.

I imagine this is true:
the Internet Haganah reasonably points out that owning a copy of it might get you in trouble in some countries, so don’t.

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