In newsstands this week, both The New Yorker and The New Republic have high-profile articles claiming that al Qaeda is unraveling because its ranks are turning against the terror group’s brand of senseless slaughter—and, moreover, as a result, that it’s inspiring moderates within Islam to unite against the fundamentalist/jihadist wing.

Writing in The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer Prize–winning history of al Qaeda, says that, as current al Qaeda leaders wage violent jihad on the West, the group’s popularity is declining “in places where it formerly enjoyed great support.” He focuses specifically on Sayid Imam al-Sharif, a.k.a. “Dr. Fadl,” the influential founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad—the organization that assassinated Anwar Sadat before partnering with al Qaeda—whose writings Wright says “indoctrinate recruits and justify killing.” (News of al-Sharif’s book-length recantation made a splash when it first appeared last July in The Guardian.)

Al-Sharif also appears in The New Republic’s piece—the cover story—which talks about the growing number of big-name “jihadists” (though how much they still qualify as such might be debatable) who are “alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries, and . . . barbaric tactics in Iraq” that are trademarks of al Qaeda’s militancy. These erstwhile terrorism apologists, the piece argues, may not have “suddenly switched to particularly progressive forms of Islam or fallen in love with the United States,” but they have expressly renounced al Qaeda’s violent ideology, like its bloody-drenched attacks on innocent civilians, particularly Muslim passersby in Arab countries. “Their anti-Al Qaeda positions,” the story says, “are making Americans safer” because these deserters can “effectively debate” the terrorist organization’s leadership like Osama bin Laden.

“While there is undoubtedly some truth in their argument that—as we can see in Iraq—the mass killings of Muslims by al Qaeda are clearly turning increasing numbers of Muslims against it,” writes The Spectator’s Melanie Phillips, “the authors’ apparent naivety and ignorance have nevertheless led them to some dangerously wrong conclusions.”

She argues that Wright as well as Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, authors of The New Republic story, are slipping into a “trap of believing that the only extremists are al Qaeda and others who support terrorism,” thus “extol[ling] as moderates those who oppose al Qaeda and terrorism”—an “entirely false and indeed lethal dichotomy.” Islamists exist, she says, especially in England, who oppose al Qaeda’s presence in certain places (Iraq, England, etc.) as a tactical mistake but still want to return to a worldwide Caliphate, overturning Western democracy with sharia law.

As other pundits have noted, when two left-leaning magazines simultaneously run major pieces chronicling al Qaeda’s hemorrhaging (even if they explain it as internal disintegration as they downplay any buckling from external U.S.-led pressure), that must portend good for the War on Terror.