Al Qaeda's steady decline

Today's Washington Post reports on Al Qaeda's shame:

"More and more Muslim and Arab populations -- [including] clerics and scholars -- are questioning the value of al-Qaeda's program," Juan Carlos Zarate, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, said Wednesday at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy

What is the evidence for this assertion? As the Post report continues:

Zarate cited an Egyptian Islamic group, which includes former jihadist leaders, that recently published a series of books "highly critical of jihadists and al-Qaeda."

...Another example is a widely circulated letter to bin Laden from a leading Saudi cleric, Sheik Salman al-Ouda, released last September, in which the religious leader asked: "How much blood has been spent" by al-Qaeda attacks?

As the Post report continued:

[Zarate] said "former extremists" had begun a campaign to discredit violent extremism through the Quilliam Foundation, a London think tank, and, according to the organization's Web site, to "help foster a genuine British Islam, native to these islands, free from the bitter politics of the Arab and Muslim world...These challenges from within Muslim communities and even extremist circles will be insurmountable at the end of the day for al-Qaeda."

Scroll down this blog for more evidence of the growing rebellion against Al Qaeda.