Al Qaeda's deputy leader accused Barack Obama of betraying his race and his father's Muslim heritage on Wednesday and urged more attacks, as the group tried to counter the incoming U.S. president's global popularity.

Osama bin Laden's second-in-command Ayman al Zawahri attacked Obama as a "house Negro," a racially-charged term used by 1960s black American Muslim leader Malcolm X to describe black slaves loyal to white masters.

"You represent the direct opposite of honorable black Americans like ... Malcolm X," Zawahri said in al Qaeda's English translation of his remarks. It was al Qaeda's first high-level commentary on Obama's election on Nov. 4.

Zawahri criticized Obama's support for Israel and plans to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where he said they were destined to fail. He called on Islamist fighters to keep striking a "criminal" United States until it withdraws from Muslim lands.

U.S. officials and analysts, alert for signs of an attack in the period leading up to the transfer of presidential power on Jan. 20, said there was no sign of an imminent threat.

They cast Zawahri's message as an attempt to shift al Qaeda's focus from U.S. President George W. Bush and maintain an enmity against the United States among its supporters.

"They're faced with what is by any accounting a change in this country," said one U.S. counterterrorism official who asked not to be identified.

"The way they're dealing with the change represented by the election of an African American as president of the United States is to insist that nothing has changed," he said.

Obama's transition office declined to comment.

His election was greeted with broad hope in the Middle East, where relations with Arabic countries were deeply strained under Bush.

Daniel Benjamin, a counterterrorism official under former President Bill Clinton, said Obama's election on a platform of breaking with Bush policies was a boost to American "soft power," or nonmilitary international influence.

"I think they (al Qaeda) are deeply threatened by the fact there is a new American president and that he has come to office saying he wants to have a more constructive relationship with the one billion Muslims in the world."

Zawahri, he said, "feels like he has a competitor for the hearts and minds."

Zawahri referred to Obama's father, who was raised Muslim but became an atheist. Obama is a practicing Christian. "You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims," Zawahri said.

The Malcolm X reference appears to reflect the influence of American-born al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn, believed to be close to Zawahri, said a U.S. terrorism monitor who goes by the pseudonym Laura Mansfield.

Zawahri has employed the "house Negro" insult before, when in 2007 he used the term to label Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, who are both black.

"And in you and in Colin Powell, Rice and your likes, the words of Malcolm X ... concerning 'House Negroes' are confirmed," Zawahri said in the message released on Wednesday.

His spoken remarks could also be translated as "house slaves," but the accompanying English translation used "house Negroes."