Various articles throughout the second issue of Inspire caution followers in the U.S. and in other Western countries against traveling abroad to join foreign terrorist organizations. Instead, readers in the West are encouraged to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries.

"I strongly recommend all the brothers and sisters coming from the West to consider attacking the West in its own backyard," Mukhtar Hassan writes. "The effect is much greater, it always embarrasses the enemy, and these types of individual attacks are nearly impossible for them to contain."

One section in Inspire, entitled, "Open Source Jihad" and written by Yahya Ibrahim, provides a resource manual that allows "Muslims to train at home instead of risking a dangerous travel abroad" and proposes several ways to wage "individual jihad" that inflicts mass casualties and economic losses. "We strongly encourage our brothers to fight jihad on U.S. soil," Ibrahim writes, "to kill a snake, strike its head." The article includes a picture of the Chicago skyline, apparently foreshadowing the terror plot against Chicago-area synagogues on October 29. AQAP claimed responsibility for this attack on November 5, 2010.

Throughout the section, Ibrahim encourages simple and direct methods of killing in place of elaborate plots that can be stopped in advance by law enforcement. One method Ibrahim suggests is to "use a pickup truck as a mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah." To ensure mass casualties, Ibrahim recommends targeting a narrow location with heavy pedestrian traffic, thereby giving bystanders little chance to run away and escape. He also suggests welding steel blades to the front of the truck to pierce through pedestrians and carrying firearms "so that you may use them to finish off your work if your vehicle gets grounded during the attack."

In another article, Ibrahim suggests a method detailed in the inaugural issue of Inspire, which provided step-by-step instructions on making an explosive device using household ingredients such as sugar, match heads, Christmas lights, batteries and a clock. Ibrahim also encourages followers with advanced degrees or specializations in microbiology or chemistry "to develop a weapon of mass destruction, i.e., an effective poison with the proper method of delivery."

Another method encourages readers to carry out attacks using firearms. Ibrahim notes that such an attack, similar to the November 2009 shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas and the June 2009 shooting at the military recruiting center in Arkansas, requires little preparation and is difficult for authorities to detect. Ibrahim proposes that a "random hit at a crowded restaurant in Washington DC [sic] at lunch hour might end up knocking out a few government employees. Targeting such employees is paramount and the location would also give the operation additional media attention." 

Suspected Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan is again depicted as a hero in an interview with Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, AQAP's second-in-command, who calls on Muslims in the West to follow in the footsteps of Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man who attempted to detonate a bomb on a transatlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009. "The operations of our brothers, Nidal Hassan [sic] and Umar al-Farouk [sic] are great heroic acts," al-Shahri asserts, "so whoever may add himself to this great list should do so and we ask Allah to grant them success."

For those who opt to engage in terrorist activities in the U.S., Inspire provides several tactics that should be employed to evade detection by law enforcement. In particular, followers should be wary of informants and avoid contact with like-minded individuals, visiting extremist Web sites and storing any "suspicious" material.