Al-Zawahiri Sends a Warm Al-Qaeda Greeting to Hungary

If Budapest seemed a bit tense last weekend, it was not just the continuing reverberations from the mid-week mid-town battle between local and foreign football hooligans. Instead, what was causing all the fingernail biting was a single word in a taped communiqué broadcast on Al-Jazeera on Friday. According to the Arabic-language TV network, the voice on the tape was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian-born surgeon who is widely believed to be Osama Bin Laden's second-in command at Al-Quaeda headquarters, wherever that is these days. And the one word he said? "Hungary."

In a to-the-point directive dutifully broadcast by the always helpful Al-Jazeera, al-Zawahiri urged Al-Quaeda's minions to act against the enemies of Islam, and for the first time included Hungary in the list of infidels to be slaughtered like soulless swines.

Al-Zawahiri (bottom) in his cave, and an artist's rendition (top) of what might happen if a low-yield atomic weapon was set off in the dome of the Buda palace, not that we're, you know, trying to give anybody any ideas, or whatever

"We should not wait until the US, British, French, Jewish, South Korean, Hungarian or Polish forces enter Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen and Algeria before we resist," Al-Zawahiri said.

According to daily Népszabadsag, the CIA has confirmed that the voice is actually OBL's deputy, who has a $25 million (roughly Ft 5 billion) bounty on his turban, courtesy of the US government. But the paper also quoted András Tóth, the civilian who oversees Hungary's secret services, as saying that the country's official alert level would not go up as a result of its inclusion in Al-Zawahiri's latest missive.

We are not sure why Hungary is not raising its alert level, given that South Korea went on "high alert" after the airing of the tape, and it was mentioned right before Hungary. Perhaps it was the fact that in most reports of the tape that we've read, Hungary doesn't even get mentioned, but is instead lumped into the nameless category of "other countries," while in at least one story, Hungary seems to be the only crusader country singled out as not worthy of mention. Frankly, this kind of slight we could get used to.