"America needs to listen to Shaykh Usaamah very carefully and take his message with great seriousness," he wrote on his blog. "America is known to be a people of arrogance."

Unlike bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents' home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.

In recent days, he has featured "glad tidings" from a North African militant leader whose group slaughtered 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq.

His neatly organized site also includes a file called "United States of Losers," which showcased a recent news broadcast about a firefight in Afghanistan with this added commentary from Khan: "You can even see an American soldier hiding during the ambush like a baby!! AllahuAkbar! AllahuAkbar!"

Khan, who was born in Saudi Arabia and grew up in Queens, N.Y., is an unlikely foot soldier in what al-Qaeda calls the "Islamic jihadi media." He has grown up in middle-class America and wrestles with his worried parents about his religious fervor. Yet he is stubborn. "I will do my best to speak the truth, and even if it annoys the disbelievers, the truth must be preached," Khan said in an interview.

While there is nothing to suggest that Khan is operating in concert with militant leaders, or breaking any laws, he is part of a growing constellation of apparently independent media operators who are broadcasting the message of al-Qaeda and other groups.

Terrorism experts at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., say there are as many as 100 English-language sites along with Khan's, which claims 500 regular readers. While their reach is difficult to assess, it is clear from a review of extremist material and interviews that militants are seeking to appeal to young American and European Muslims by playing on their anger over the war in Iraq and the image of Islam under attack.

Tedious Arabic screeds are reworked into flashy English productions. Grainy car-bombing tapes are turned into slick hip-hop videos and montage movies, all readily available on Western sites such as YouTube, the online video smorgasbord.

"It is as if you would watch a Hollywood movie," said Abu Saleh, a 21-year-old German devotee of al-Qaeda videos who visits Internet cafes in Berlin twice a week to get the latest releases. "The Internet has totally changed my view on things."

Message for the West

Al-Qaeda and its followers have used the Internet to communicate and rally support for years, but in the past several months the Western tilt of the message and the sophistication of the media have accelerated. So has the output. Since the beginning of the year, al-Qaeda's media operation, Al Sahab, has issued new videotapes as often as every three days. Even more come from Iraq, where insurgents are pumping them out daily.

Last spring, al-Qaeda made what analysts say was a bold attempt to tap potential supporters in the United States. In a videotaped interview, Ayman al-Zawahri, a bin Laden lieutenant, praised Malcolm X and urged American blacks and other minorities to see that "we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all of mankind."

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