"Jihad heavily relies on money," writes Mr. al-Awlaki. "Without wealth there can be no jihad."

"Rather than the Muslims financing their jihad from their own pockets, they should finance it from the pockets of their enemies," he adds in the article, a lengthy recitation of the Islamic jurisprudential debates over "Ganimah," or war booty.

"Our jihad cannot depend wholly on donations made by Muslims," he writes, noting "jihad around the world is in dire need of financial support."

He draws on the concept in Islamic theology and jurisprudence of "dar al harb," or "land of war" - those parts of the world where Muslims and non-believers are in a state of conflict - to argue that "Muslims are not bound by the covenants of citizenship" in Western countries.

"It is the consensus of our scholars that the property of the disbelievers in dar al-harb is halal [permissible for believers to use] and is a legitimate target for the mujahedin," Mr. al-Awlaki states.

Although these are long-established elements of extremist ideology and several al Qaeda operatives have financed themselves through petty crime, some scholars see the timing of the article as important.

"It is significant that he took the time and space to offer this justification now," Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told The Washington Times. "It is even more significant because he juxtaposes [stealing funds] to donations."

Mr. Joscelyn, who posted an analysis of the article online at thefoundation's Long War Journal website, noted that Mr. al-Awlakiacknowledges in the article that al Qaeda's enemies have succeeded in slowing down the flow of donations that had helped fund its activities.

Leading al Qaeda scholar Peter Bergen said the article does not sound a "new theme" in extremist thought and noted that many of the first generation of homegrown radicals, like would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and would-be "dirty" bomber Jose Padilla, had a criminal past before they were recruited to al Qaeda.

"Many of those attracted to this were petty criminals in the first place," he said.

The 67-page glossy magazine, the fourth edition of Inspire, was published last weekend by al Qaedain the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemen-based extremist franchise. It also contains an article urging lone-wolf extremists in the West to blow up buildings using natural gas - a plot believed to have originated almost a decade ago with Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The article advocates using the gas supply in an apartment building to cause explosions at key supporting points in the architecture to bring the building down.

Analysts linked both these articles to a new emphasis on bottom-up organizing by al Qaeda in which the terror network uses the Internet to radicalize young Muslims, singly or in small groups, and then incites them to commit small-group or lone-wolf attacks.

Using social media is an important part of the bottom-up strategy and among other websites from which Inspire could be downloaded Tuesday morning was a Facebook page. By the afternoon, the page was unavailable, though the magazine was still accessible through multiple file-sharing sites on the Internet.

Facebook does not comment on decisions about individual pages, but an executive there told The Times on condition of anonymity that the company had removed the page for violations of its terms of service.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an e-mail: "There is no place on Facebook for people who promote violence and we devote significant resources to prevent even the rare instances when people try to misuse our service."

Mr. Noyes said employees proactively scan the site for pages that promote violence "using sophisticated tools and lists from the State and Treasury Departments" and pass information about them to the authorities.