The Enduring influence of Anwar al-Awlaki in the age of the Islamic State.
Figure 1: Anwar al Awlaki, when he was a “moderate” Muslim.
Anwar al-Awlaki’s Enduring Influence from beyond The Grave in the Age of the Islamic State.
The most effective contemporary fount of inspiration and ideology within modern Islamist jihadist groups Anwar al -Awlaki.
The “inspiration”, for many would be and actual jihadist’s in the West and many of those, flocking to the Islamic State is this man, Anwar al Awlaki. Killed in an American drone strike in 2011, Awlaki remains an enduring ideologue, through the medium of Social Media, specifically YouTube, capable of relating to the many western Muslims, while explaining obscure and complex Islamic exegesis, for a modern Western Muslim audience.
The man cited on this Blog as Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi (Trinidadian Shane Crawford), names Awlaki as the one who opened his understanding here is Crawford in his own words: “In my case, like so many other Muslims in the West, the da’wah to jihad took hold of me through the lectures of Shaykh Anwar al-‘Awlaqi. After listening to his various lectures repeatedly, I gained a firmer understanding of what we as Muslims were supposed to be doing. I listened to his lecture series titled “Constants on the Path of Jihad” and his lecture series on “The Book of Jihad.”
Faisal Shazad, the Detroit airplane bomber, the Boston Marathon bombers and a host of other jihadi luminaries all name, Awlaki as an inspiration for their acts of terrorism, here I will examine his death, his son’s murder by the Americans and his enduring influence amongst jihadists in the age of the Islamic State.
The following is quoted from the CTC Sentinel in an article by Scott Shane: “Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the leading English-language propagandist for al-Qa`ida, was killed in an American drone strike in 2011. But his influence has lived on into the Islamic State era, enhanced by his status as a martyr for Islam in the eyes of his admirers. His massive internet presence has turned up as a factor in several attacks since his death, including most recently the San Bernardino shootings and the Orlando nightclub attack as well as a significant number of terrorism cases on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite his long association with al-Qa`ida and that network’s rivalry with the upstart Islamic State, al-Awlaki has been embraced by the Islamic State and its followers, and he continues to inspire terrorism from beyond the grave.
Awlaki was born in Las Cruzes New Mexico 1971. Awlaki’s early years were spent in The United States, he spoke better English (colloquial American English), than Arabic.
Figure 3: Awlaki calls for death Americans . In this March 2010 video.
The following is quoted from an article in “The Atlantic”, by Connor Friedersdorf : “First, it's vital for the uninitiated to understand how Team Obama misleads when it talks about its drone program. Asked how their kill list can be justified, Gibbs replies that "When there are people who are trying to harm us, and have pledged to bring terror to these shores, we've taken that fight to them."
Since the kill list itself is secret, there's no way to offer a specific counterexample. But we do know that U.S. drones are targeting people who've never pledged to carry out attacks in the United States. Take Pakistan, where the CIA kills some people without even knowing their identities. "As Obama nears the end of his term, officials said the kill list in Pakistan has slipped to fewer than 10 al-Qaeda targets, down from as many as two dozen," the Washington Post reports. "
The son of Awlaki was also killed read (murdered), in a US drone strike giving rise to vexing legal and moral questions, within Washington’s ruling elites’ circles, the wider American public and the international community. With the aid of the ACLU, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki unsuccessfully challenged the Obama administrations’ legal and moral right, to kill his son and murder his grandson.
Figure : Photo of 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their country -- they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs against America and Americans: the rare man of words who could be said to have a body count. When he was killed, on September 30, 2011, President Obama made a speech about it; a few months later, when the Obama administration’s public-relations campaign about its embrace of what has come to be called "targeted killing" reached its climax in a front-page story in the New York Times that presented the President of the United States as the last word in deciding who lives and who dies, he was quoted as saying that the decision to put Anwar al-Awlaki on the kill list -- and then to kill him -- was "an easy one." But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list.
Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone "operational," as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests. He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.
How does Team Obama justify killing him?
The answer Gibbs gave is chilling:
ADAMSON: ...It's an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he's underage. He's a minor.
GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the wellbeing of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.
Again, note that this kid wasn't killed in the same drone strike as his father. He was hit by a drone strike elsewhere, and by the time he was killed, his father had already been dead for two weeks.
Nasser al-Awlaki, Anwar’s father, twice went to federal court in an effort, as he saw it, to force the United States to live up to its own principles. The first lawsuit, filed in 2010, sought to have his son removed from the so-called kill list and was dismissed. The second, jointly filed by Dr. Awlaki and Sarah Khan, sought to force the government to reveal information on the killings of Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, Sarah’s son. In this April 4, 2014 opinion, United States District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer dismissed the second lawsuit. “In this delicate area of warmaking, national security, and foreign relations,” she wrote, “the judiciary has an exceedingly limited role,” she wrote.
The evidence in Awlaki’s case point’s to a man hell bent on killing as many American “infidels”, as possible even as he “inspired” ,by his own account others to do so. The American government on both moral and legal grounds was justified in killing him. His son though appeared to be exactly what he was, an innocent young boy, who loved his father his killing and the killing of his nine companions including a cousin, by the US Obama administration was murder pure and simple.
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