With al-Qaeda on its heels in Lebanon and facing local uprisings in Iraq, al-Qaeda must be looking for someplace to claim a victory (as long as the Democrats do it for them in surrendering Iraq). Iraq was clearly too big a prize for a disparate organization like al-Qaeda to bite off, especially with US support siding against them. Lebanon is also proving to be a bit hard for them to achieve success. But did al-Qaeda finally get a win by limiting their reach even further and ocusing on the Gaza Strip?

From Cairo to Riyadh to here in Amman, Jordan, Arab governments kept a close eye on the civil war in Gaza.

On the streets of Amman, there was shock and disbelief at the level of brutality between Hamas and Fatah fighters.

“No one could have imagined the violence and killing we saw on television. It was bad,” one resident of Amman said.

More than half the population of Amman is Palestinian and support for the terrorist group Hamas is high.

Another resident said, “They should not be fighting each other they should be fighting Israel, the enemy.”

But a leading Jordanian terrorism analyst worries that this latest struggle has been more than just a power struggle for Gaza and the West Bank territories. He believes it also signals a renewed campaign by al -Qaeda to infiltrate the regimes of the Middle East.

“I think there is a strategic decision within al Qaeda to get closer to the Arab-Israeli conflict to be involved in this conflict and there are many signals, by the way,” said Oraib al-Rantawi of the al-Quds Center for Political Studies.

“Look for example in Gaza nowadays,” he said. “Since the winning of Hamas in the last elections in Palestine, at least five to six new organizations have emerged in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. All of them have the same names of al Qaeda in its early beginning stages.”

Today, al-Qaeda and the global jihadists’ goals are to topple and destroy the moderate Arab and Muslim nations, beginning in Egypt, then Jordan and finally Saudi Arabia.

“There are no illusions about what the global jihadists want to establish once they bring down the 21 Arab states, the 52 Muslim states both moderate and religious. They want to re-establish in their own mind the caliphate, the Khalifah, that would be a religious empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to China,” Middle East expert Walid Phares said.

In just the past six months, there’ve been deadly attacks or foiled plots by al-Qaeda-linked groups against Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco, and Lebanon.

So far the results for al-Qaeda have been less than impressive. The SurrenderMedia overreacts to every incident as if it is some kind of unforeseen and unstoppable action gripping the region. I am not playing down al-Qaeda’s evil intentions, just the results. As with many fascist movements they can inflict some localized damage and attempt to cow the populace into servitude to them. But what has actually been happening is the Muslim street has been rising up and, with the exception of Gaza, beating al-Qaeda’s minions. We shall see how long their grip on Gaza lasts. My guess is Israel might go in and do some cleansing of al-Qaeda.