Photo by lintmachine (flickr)

One of the last online stories run by The New York Sun before they folded at the end of September concerned reports of an “October surprise” by al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists.  To many observers, it stood to reason that we could see a repeat of the 2004 Madrid bombings, which propelled Jose Zapatero and his Socialist Party to power, whereupon his first major act was to withdraw Spanish forces from Iraq.  Digital chatter on Islamic networks was hot when The Sun ran the story, so the warning wasn’t really all that outlandish.

The story was picked up by blogs and news organizations big and small, but despite similar warnings by Brigitte Gabriel (as I reported here) and others, the prevailing wisdom was that a terror attack before the national elections is unlikely because it could trigger support for John McCain, who it is presumed is the more frightful (to jihadists) of the presidential contenders.

As we near the end of Ramadan, jihad attacks have noticeably increased in frequency and intensity everywhere, particularly in Pakistan, where security forces are on red alert, which for some reason translates into firing on US military choppers across the border in war-torn Afghanistan.  As usual, I have been monitoring the daily jihadi cyber- chatter, which appears to be largely  concerned with the current US financial meltdown.  Glee and exhilaration in the face of our misfortune unsurprisingly characterizes jihadi discussion about the Wall Street crisis, and I was just beginning to wonder what this preoccupation with the economic situation might mean when prominent counter-terrorism analyst Brigitte Gabriel explained it:

Some [jihadists] are talking that this is the time to strike, while America is down.

Clearly, now would be an especially inopportune time for a domestic terror emergency—not that there’s any such thing as a good time for one, from our perspective, at least—but I’m not personally aware of any Islamist chatter to that effect.  Ms. Gabriel, however, says the radicals are “talking” about it, and presumably she has better primary sources.  In a WorldNet Daily exclusive, she refers knowingly to the heartbeat on “the Muslim street,” which for my money is good enough to raise the terror alert level.

You can read Gabriel’s remarks here, and embedded in the article is an hour-long audio file of the KSFO interview with Barbara Simpson.

Photo of Ms. Gabriel from her website, American Congress for Truth