This story popped up as a bit of a blast from the past… literally a blast in one sense. Back in April Adam Gadahn, known as “the American al Qaeda,” was killed in an air strike to the great pleasure of many people here at home. Some claim it was an accidental kill while others suspected that we’d been trying to get that particular thorn out of our side for quite some time and bringing him back for a trial was simply too problematic. In any event, he’s dead, but his memory lives on in the many videos he published as the western voice of terror. As it turns out, one of them included a screed against ISIS rather than his usual rants against his former homeland.

In it, he expresses the admiration his AQ bosses had for the Islamic State, but warns them that they’ve gone too far and their place in paradise is in danger. (From Yahoo News)

“My dear brothers: While no one can deny the considerable strength and prowess of the Islamic State group [ISIS] in military terms, at the same time, the crimes it has committed against Muslims cannot simply be overlooked or forgotten with time, because in Islam there is no statute of limitations,” the late Adam Gadahn said, according to an al Qaeda magazine published recently online. “And if these wrongs are not brought to an end and rectified here in this world, then a severe punishment has been promised both for those who committed them as well as those who encouraged, condoned or justified them, even if from behind a computer or mobile phone thousands of miles away.”

“Oppression of any kind is wrong, and [there] will be darkness for its perpetrator on the Day of Judgment. The Ummah’s [Muslim community’s] Jihad is not a video game; it is real life, with real consequences, in this world and the next,” he said.

Surprisingly, the video rant – allegedly filmed last fall – contains all sorts of complaints against ISIS which could have come straight off the pages of the New York Post. He fires off charges at the leaders of ISIS for killing of a large number of Muslims on the flimsiest of pretexts. He goes on to decry the terror group’s displacing largely powerless and defenseless minorities and slaughtering their men and enslaving their women and children.

These are all valid charges to be sure, but one has to wonder whether Adam had any sense of the irony dripping from his complaints? What he describes may be more obvious, publicized and extreme in the way it’s practiced by ISIS, but isn’t he complaining about pretty much the same thing that takes place in remote Muslim societies all across the region where he lived until his death? There may not be quite the same level of blatant sex slave sales markets in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but the women there are essentially chattel who are auctioned off as “wives” whether they like it or not and are kept in the virtual chains of ignorance and oppression. They regularly kill perceived apostates in the most horrible of fashions while they slaughter and oppress all who don’t follow the rules blindly.

For Gadahn to wag his finger at ISIS is laughable, but I suppose they wanted some separation from the new kids on the block considering how much heat they were bringing down on everyone. If Adam had lived long enough to see the entire putrid theater of terror play out he might have come to some moment of insight himself. What a pity he never got the chance to, eh?