Yes, I am partial to blondes

Monica Crowley, Alan Colmes' sister in law coincidentally, analyzes the new Al Qaeda broadcast:

Osama bin Laden's deputy gangster Ayman al-Zawahiri is back with a new videotape, and the press went wild with his offensive description of Barack Obama as a "house negro."

But buried in the tape is something much more important. At two different points, al-Zawahiri seems to be calling out Obama as an apostate of Islam.

"You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America." Later, he claims that Obama shares views with other "traitors" to Islam. Unlike Malcolm X, says al-Zawahiri, Obama is a fraud: the apostate son of a Muslim father who has fallen in with the Jews and the Christians. In al Qaeda's eyes, then, Obama isn't "change" at all.

Under Islam, those born to Muslim fathers are automatically Muslim. In some interpretations, there is a grace period before adulthood when one may leave the religion. After that point, however, one cannot leave Islam, and abandoning the faith is, in many places in the Islamic world, punishable by death.

It is unclear when Obama left Islam. He's talked about how the Reverend Jeremiah Wright brought him to Jesus. He's talked about how that was 20 years ago. He's 47 now, which means he was 27 when the conversion happened. That would be way out of the "grace period" during early adolescence when one might be able to leave Islam with impunity.

Some might argue that since neither his biological father nor his step-father was a particularly devout Muslim (Obama has gone as far as describing his biological father as bordering on atheist), that the rules didn't apply to Obama. That may be true here in the West----but it isn't true in the Muslim world. And it's certainly not al Qaeda's interpretation.

Apostasy is a crime of the highest order in Islam. If the Islamists are of the opinion that Obama is an apostate, how will that factor into their calculations about him----and about us?