Adapting Strategy

Weer'd Beard writes today about the Taliban's recent effort to promote jihad in the US by encouraging American Muslims to purchase weapons at gun shows and indiscriminately using them on the rest of the American populace. Weer'd easily disproves the validity of the information, but kind of surprisingly may have overlooked the general usefulness of the strategy as I pointed out in comments:

Another possibility might be a conscious effort to emulate the Brady’s and Joyce Foundation mouthpieces; make the (however erroneous) case of ease of access to firearms to their local audience and then cite any criminal use of firearms as an example of “jihad in America” to same. This “proves” the universal nature of Islam and Jihad, doesn’t it?

They’re misogynistic* (sp?) predators, but they’re not stupid. They are also reported to be well established in the UK university system, so access to modern western (US) political philosophy and policy tracts is readily available to jihadi supporters.

Weer'd Beard regularly posts on Joyce Foundation efforts to manipulate news reports of criminal use of firearms in his "gun death" series of posts. This gun show effort by Al Qaeda/Taliban leadership strikes me as being almost identical in both practice and intent; lie about the state of American gun ownership and manipulate crime news reports to destabilize American social and political structures so as to better advance an opposition alternate viewpoint. The strategy offers the minor possibility of changing US domestic law/policy as well as serving to validate leadership credentials within the Taliban/Al Qaeda organizational structure and the general Islamic populace outside the US.

EDIT: SAILORCURT reaches a similar conclusion by a different contextual structure. Well worth a read.

*Spelling errors corrected.