Once they turned hijacked airplanes into missiles. Now al-Qaida is encouraging jihadist wannabes to set your car on fire and blow out your tires on the highway.

That's the advice from the DIY jihad section in the latest issue of al-Qaida's English-language web magazine, Inspire. The new "Open Source Jihad" (.pdf) is all about vehicular vandalism.

One suggestion, penned by "Ibnul Irhab" in the new issue of Inspire, is to run up on parked cars with gas cans and a matchstick. "How safe will the West feel when parking their cars, knowing they're up for a TORCHING," Irhab writes. His helpful tips: avoid CCTV cameras; hide the gas in an apple juice bottle; and, importantly, "don't get petrol on yourself." This is what Open Source Jihad bills as "America's worst nightmare."

Nor is it safe to drive to the store or the office. Inspire encourages the inspired to smear "lubricative oil" on roadways right before sharp blind turns to cause a traffic accident. ("Demolition Derby Style," it promises.) If that doesn't sound terrorist-y enough, another tip is to hammer nails into a pegboard painted black so oncoming cars blow out their tires. There's even a chart explaining the physics behind car crashes for Inspire's slower readers.

Once again, Open Source Jihad is lowering its standards. Earlier issues of Inspire's "Jihad Kitchen" gave Anarchist Cookbook-style tips about cooking up explosives and instructions on blowing up apartment buildings. Its last foray into vehicular assaults involved tricking out the grille of an F-150 with knives to create an "ultimate mowing machine." (Even Osama bin Laden rolled his eyes at that one.) The apparent calculation behind the half-assed car torchings and unsafe driving conditions is that they need to lower the barriers to entry for jihad, since pretty much no American Muslims bother with it.

On the other hand, road accidents kill way more Americans than al-Qaida ever has, so its junior-varsity squad might as well try to take credit for them.