Personaly, I believe al-Qaeda is scarier when they stay quiet and execute their nihilist and violent strategy without any accompanying messages. This one in particular, comes across - from a Western perspective - as flaky, and provides you with even more evidence that the group's terms of reference are essentially medieval:

Al-Qaeda has threatened the Queen by naming her as “one of the severest enemies of Islam” in a video message to justify the July bombings in London.

The warning has been passed by MI5 to the Queen’s protection team after it obtained the unexpurgated version of a video issued by Al-Qaeda after the 7/7 attacks. Parts of it were broadcast on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite channel.

In the video, Ayman al- Zawahiri, second-in-command to Osama Bin Laden, targets the Queen as ultimately responsible for Britain’s “crusader laws” and denounces her as an enemy of Muslims.

On a more serious note, two questions though: (a) why was this video message supressed for four months by British intelligence services and (b) was it possibly targeted at Britain's Muslim population in order to drive some sort of wedge into British society?

UPDATE: My second question deserves a response and here’s an anecdote from the days I worked in Britain. At the department where I worked at the time, we had a young Pakistani girl who looked after IT and her cockney accent was thicker than anything you would hear in your average East London pub. Her family was devout Muslim yet one day she relayed to me the story that on the day of Princess Diana’s wedding her parents ordered the whole family to stay home and watch the proceedings on TV. For them it must have been some rite of passage, paying respect to and being involved in the life of the monarch that ruled over the empire that had brought them to London and where they were doing reasonably well.

It’s hard to say if al-Zawahiri’s call targeting Queen Elizabeth is aimed at British Muslims who consider the Head of the Church of England to be their notional leader, but it’s something to think about.