A new election season is upon us, and you know what that means -- it means we're going to be told once again that we need to fear THE EVIL WITHIN!!!!

An American thought to be an al-Qaida activist appeared in a videotape with the terror group's deputy leader Saturday and called on his countrymen to convert to Islam and for U.S. soldiers to switch sides in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The 48-minute video, posted on an Islamic militant Web site, had footage of al-Qaida's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, and of Adam Yehiye Gadahn, a 28-year-old American....

Saturday's video - and the length of Gadahn's speech - suggested al-Qaida has found in him someone it believes can communicate effectively with Americans....

Much of Gadahn's latest speech was dedicated to urging Americans to convert to Islam....

Gosh, there hasn't been this much attention paid to Gadahn since his last video, which emerged just days before the 2004 election and stirred the likes of Matt Drudge and Michelle Malkin to heights of righteous indignation.

Whoops, sorry -- that wasn't Gadahn's last tape. He also appeared in Al Qaeda videos released to mark the 2005 anniversary of September 11 and this year's anniversary of the July 7 London train bombings. Curiously, Malkin never mentioned Gadahn in her coverage of the 7/7 anniversary and only briefly mentioned him at the tale end of this post in September '05. I guess you want to wait for the right moment in the election cycle to work this guy into the Two-Minutes Hate.

Walid Phares over at David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine tells us we need to be terrified:

The video tape issued by al Qaeda's "as-sahhab" production, in which Ayman Zawahiri introduces Jihadist Adam Gahdan to the world as a senior speaker to the American people on behalf of the movement, should be taken seriously. Not necessarily at the level of detecting the next terror attack but at the level of understanding this prelude to future Jihad both in America and within the West.... [Gadahn] is the clearest specimen of Jihadism’s second generation within the US, in as much as the 7/7 videos revealed the type of future Jihadists for Great Britain's second generation....

Damn, did I miss jihadism's first generation within the U.S.? I really have to pay more attention.

Elsewhere we learn that another FrontPage contributor, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, was name-checked by Gadahn in his video:

If the Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Michael Scheuer, Steven Emerson, and yes, even the crusader-in-chief George W. Bush were to abandon their unbelief and repent and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers in Islam.

Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson -- yeah, those are names that are really going to get America's youth to put down their Xboxes and fight for Allah.

Please -- enough. All we learn from this is that the jihadists, as propagandists, are perhaps even more inept than their crusader enemies here in America.

(And I do think these tapes are real, not fakes as some have argued -- it's hard to believe the administration would authorize the release of a fake video that included Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris and a longtime Bush critic, on a list of jihad's enemies, on the same level with right-wingers like Spencer and Pipes. That's not this crew's style.)