Al-Jazeera's mass Arab audience and critical worldview made it the best way for Bin Laden to reach the Arab world. But the antipathy to American foreign policy so prominent in Al-Jazeera's narrative should not be confused with support for Al-Qaeda's violent strategy or extreme Islamist goals.

Al-Jazeera is hardly a paragon of Islamist advocacy: Many of its leading news presenters and talk-show hosts are beautiful, unveiled women, and many of its popular figures are determinedly iconoclastic. Its leading Islamist figure, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is a fierce critic of Bin Laden's form of Islamist extremism (and is regularly castigated in jihadi circles as a dangerous, misguided American dupe). Nor can Al-Jazeera's narrative be reduced to a simple anti-Americanism. It shows the carnage in Iraq, but it also shows democratic elections and gives ample voice to those who condemn Al-Qaeda's Mesopotamian strategy. In its fervent, sustained criticism of the Arab status quo and its advocacy of democratic reforms, Al-Jazeera can sometimes sound surprisingly like an American neoconservative organ.

Al-Jazeera's approach to these videos has hardly been one of willing propagandist, and it has changed over time. In June, when Zawahiri released a tape condemning Egypt's Kefaya ("Enough") movement - a coalition of liberal, Arab nationalist, and moderate Islamist protestors challenging Mubarak's regime - Al-Jazeera followed each excerpt with discussion by the Islamist lawyer (and Bin Laden critic) Montasser al-Zayat, Jordanian liberal Muhammad Abu Roman and Kefaya activist Ahmed Baha al-Din Sha'aban. This transformed Zawahiri's lecture into a dialogue and denied him the monopoly on political discourse he so craved. In January, Bin Laden released his first message in over a year, and Al-Jazeera invited the able, Arabic-speaking American diplomat Alberto Fernandez to respond.

Al-Jazeera appeared to have had Bin Laden's message long enough to carry out fairly extensive editing with commentary interspersed with the text.