Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged followers in an audio recording published on one of the group's websites on Monday to hunt down and kill Jews and Americans wherever they can be found.

"Today there is no room for he who says that we should only fight the Jews in Palestine [sic]," said al-Zawahri in a recording that follows close on the heels of a message by Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden calling for a holy war to "liberate Palestine."

Previously, Al Qaeda had only openly called for murdering Jews in Israel, toeing the fashionable Muslim line that Islam respects the Jews in general, and only has a problem with the existence of a sovereign Jewish entity on formerly Muslim-controlled lands.