The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
‘Moderate’ Meets Maker
The Yemeni Air Force has attacked America, or so you might have thought if you’d read the Associated Press’s technically true but misleading headline [on Friday]: “2 US Citizens Dead in Yemen Airstrike.” It was actually a CIA airstrike in Yemen, and the targets, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, were unlawful enemy combatants who happened to be U.S. citizens by accident of birth.
Khan was a propagandist, one of the editors of “an English-language Al Qaeda web magazine called ‘Inspire.’ ” Inspire recently published an article critical of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for denying that al Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 attacks–which, as we noted Wednesday, makes it a sort of unfunny terrorist version of the Onion.
Awlaki, whose killing by drone President Obama approved last year, was the better known of the two. Among other things, as FoxNews.com reports, he “exchanged up to 20 emails with U.S. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, alleged killer of 13 people in the Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at Fort Hood.” He also inspired or helped plan “the botched Christmas 2009 attempt to blow up an American airliner heading to Detroit and a foiled 2010 attempt to send explosives to Chicago,” as well as the failed Times Square bombing of 2010.
Fox quotes our friend Richard Miniter, author of several books on terrorism, as observing of Awlaki that “he understood American society very well. He understood American idioms and pop culture and how to appeal to Americans.” That’s an understatement. Years before Awlaki became known for recruiting American Muslims for violent jihad, he was a poster boy for “moderate” Islam, as evidenced by this New York Times story dated Oct. 19, 2001:
Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, spiritual leader at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest, which draws about 3,000 worshipers for communal prayers each Friday, said: “In the past we were oblivious. We didn’t really care much because we never expected things to happen. Now I think things are different. What we might have tolerated in the past, we won’t tolerate any more.”
“There were some statements that were inflammatory, and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent radical way,” said Mr. Al-Awlaki, who at 30 is held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West: born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University.
It is too early to say whether their message will be heeded, or whether it is mere posturing.
As Alana Goodman noted in an August 2010 NewsBusters.org report, the Times wasn’t alone:
The Baltimore Sun also latched onto the theme. “Al-Awlaki bridges the two worlds as easily as he shifts from lecturing on the lives of the prophets to tapping phone numbers into his Palm Pilot [a now-antiquated electronic device],” reported the paper on October 28, 2001. “He and other Muslims say they support action against terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in retaliation for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks[.]”
And while there was no coverage of the Virginia mosque by the major network news stations, other media outlets expressed concern over the difficulties faced by Muslim “moderates” like Al-Awlaki.
“The war of ideas in the Muslim world pits extremists, like Osama bin Laden . . . and moderates, who want to solve the problems without violence. But right now this war of ideas is a lopsided one, says Imam Anwar Awlaki, the prayer leader at the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia,” reported NPR on Nov. 1, 2001.
“Awlaki, whose mosque is one of the largest in the U.S., sees himself as a Muslim leader who could help build bridges between Islam and the West. [B]ut political scientist Telhami says these are difficult days for Muslim moderates,” the NPR report continued.
Of the 30 articles in the [Washington] Post that mentioned the Dar al-Hijrah mosque, not one questioned the prayer center’s extremist leadership. Instead, many were glowing portraits of the mosque’s summer camp, its charitable activities and its members’ apparent concerns about anti-Muslim hate crimes.
“A sparkling sun in a pale blue sky, crisp air, children laughing and friends all around: ‘Yes, it is a beautiful day,’ declared Mohammad Hassan. Outside the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, a festival was going on, a celebration at the end of the holiest month on the Islamic calendar, and now Hassan looked toward the heavens,” began one particularly flattering Washington Post story from Mar. 3, 1995.
We wondered if, in the course of covering today’s news, any of these organizations would own up to their past credulity in covering today’s news. The Sun doesn’t even cover it, relying on a Reuters dispatch about the dispatching. The Post has a report from Dar al-Hijrah, where the news “ripped open a wound that congregants wish would heal.” It quotes a statement from the mosque:
“Today the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center acknowledges the death of a former imam, Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki. While employed at Dar Al-Hijrah, Imam Al-Awlaki was known for his interfaith outreach, civic engagement and tolerance in the Northern Virginia community,” read the statement. . . .
“However, after Mr. Al-Awlaki’s departure from the mosque in 2002 he was arrested by Yemeni authorities and allegedly tortured. It was then that Al-Awlaki began preaching violence and has now died violently in an apparent drone strike. In recent years, while in his self imposed exile, Mr. Al-Awlaki encouraged impressionable American Muslims to attack their own country. With his death, Al-Awlaki will no longer be able to spread his hate speech over the internet to our youth.
“We reiterate that as an American faith community we do not accept violence nor extremism and re-commit ourselves to our message living our faith in peace, tolerance and the promotion of the public good,” the statement concluded.
So far today’s New York Times story has nothing about Awlaki’s “moderate” background, though the homepage does link to a 2010 piece titled “Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad.”
NPR, to its credit, posts transcripts of the two “Talk of the Nation” programs on which Awlaki appeared. Of the second, in January 2002, the network’s Mark Memmott observes:
And at the end of the conversation, al-Awlaki made a point that in retrospect reads looks like a signal of where his attitude toward America was heading:
“If you go down the list, whether it’s Iraq or Afghanistan or some other countries–plus, a lot of the oppression that is happening in the Muslim world is from governments in the Muslim world that are allies of the United States. So it’s quite natural to have a level of anti-American foreign policy among the Muslim community simply because the victims or the ones who are affected are Muslim countries.”
On the other hand, how is that Awlaki quote from 2002 different from what, say, Ron Paul says in 2011? And predictably enough, as NPR reports, Paul denounced the U.S. for “assassinating” Awlaki. Fellow libertarian Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson said he had “mixed feelings” about the strike, the Hill reports:
“This is the first US citizen that has ever been targeted for death by the United States government. So this is unprecedented and I certainly at best have mixed feelings about this, this is why this country was established, was you can’t have a government going through the countryside rounding up citizens because they are a threat to the country and then putting them to death,” Johnson said.
How fatuous. If Awlaki had been hiding out “in the countryside” he might have been arrested and brought to trial. He had to be hit with a drone because he was in a foreign country whose government was unable to take care of the matter itself. Johnson “did, however, say that he would continue drone attacks on non-American terrorist leaders as president,” the Hill reports. And after all, as a candidate, Johnson certainly has kept droning on.
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