Jim
"it is gratuitous nonsense to claim that "Al Qaeda is no longer relevant to Arabs." ."

Here is some more of it Jim.


How the Arab Spring Made Bin Laden an Afterthought
By Rania Abouzeid / Beirut

During these past few months of momentous political upheaval in the Middle East, Al-Qaeda's leaders were barely seen or heard. Their feeble attempts to claim a role in unshackling Arabs from their decades-old, repressive (and largely pro-American) regimes were ignored. In many ways, Osama bin Laden and his band of extremist brothers were already largely irrelevant in this region long before news of the terror mastermind's death in Pakistan. The movement was marginalized and "little more than a symbol as a result of his past achievements," as Peter Harling, a Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group, told TIME.


Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, says that in recent years, Al-Qaeda morphed from an organization into an idea, "and the idea has proven increasingly unattractive to most Arabs," he tweeted. "Bin Laden, Hamid says, "presided over Al-Qaeda's turn toward irrelevance the past five years."


, says Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Italy, and one of the world's foremost experts on Islam Roy says, "but the bigger blow was already dealt. "It wasn't making headlines in the Middle East, it ceased to be at the core of the region's issues."

While Reuters reported that the Palestinian militant group Hamas released a statement condemning the "assassination" of an "Arab holy warrior," the Palestinian Authority had a very different take on bin Laden's take down. Spokesman Ghassan Khatib said bin Laden's death "is good for the cause of peace worldwide." In Yemen, a member of Al-Qaeda contacted by AFP called the killing a "catastrophe."


"It's certainly coincidence that the two events are linked in time, but in fact it's logical because the death of bin Laden symbolized the marginalization of Al-Qaeda in the Middle East," Roy says.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2068931,00.html