{"id":543,"date":"2010-11-06T22:39:18","date_gmt":"2010-11-06T22:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2010\/11\/06\/awlaki-research-featured-in-today-s-telegraph\/"},"modified":"2010-11-06T22:39:18","modified_gmt":"2010-11-06T22:39:18","slug":"awlaki-research-featured-in-today-s-telegraph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2010\/11\/06\/awlaki-research-featured-in-today-s-telegraph\/","title":{"rendered":"Awlaki Research Featured in Today’s Telegraph"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY ALEXANDER MELEAGROU-HITCHENS\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Daily Telegraph<\/em> has featured research from a recent paper<\/a> I co-authored with my former colleague, Jacob Amis, which covers, among other things, Anwar al-Awlaki\u2019s time in the UK.<\/p>\n

The full article can be accessed here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Among Awlaki\u2019s biggest backers in recent years have been CagePrisoners, and yesterday they released a statement<\/a> attempting to explain their stance on the al-Qaeda preacher.\u00a0 Among their excuses is that Awlaki was not, at the time of their promotion<\/a> of him in 2009, charged with any crime.\u00a0 This is indeed true, but also a very weak defence, which CagePrisoners should know better than to use.\u00a0 He had, by this time, professed clear and open support for al-Qaeda\u2019s violent jihad, both on his blog, and in his various works, including his translation of Youssef al-Uyayree\u2019s Constants in the Path of Jihad.\u00a0 <\/em>CagePrisoners claim that there was \u201cnothing criminally wrong\u201d with what Awlaki had said or done up to this point.\u00a0 Something that is not \u201ccriminally wrong\u201d\u00a0can still be harmful and inflammatory,\u00a0and this shows the weakness of CagePrisoners\u2019 position; the best they can say to defend themselves is essentially \u201chey, we weren\u2019t promoting a convicted criminal, so leave us alone already!\u201d That sets the bar quite low, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 I thought CagePrisoners were a progressive and moderate group that fights for human rights, and yet when they defend their, until now,\u00a0uncritical support for a jihadist, they can\u2019t come up with a better excuse than that?<\/p>\n

It is also worth going back to Awlaki\u2019s blog again briefly: a report<\/a> I published last year showed that, as well as posting a banned video of Awlaki on their site (which remains<\/a> on their Youtube page and on their old website<\/a>), CagePrisoners also reproduced<\/a> materials from his blog on their website, including his laudatory book review of Sayyid Qutb\u2019s In the Shade of the Koran<\/em>. This is the same blog which included statements like<\/p>\n

\n

as Muslims we should not subject Islam to the whims of the people, if they chose it we implement it, if they don\u2019t we accept the choice of the masses. Our position is that we will implement the rule of Allah on earth by the tip of the sword whether the masses like it or not. We will not subject sharia rule to popularity contests.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This was written in August 2008, and was not the exception to an otherwise moderate rule, but rather the tone of everything he was writing at the time.<\/p>\n

Yet, in their statement yesterday, CagePrisoners claim that Awlaki\u2019s extremism only became apparent to them\u00a0\u201din the interviews he conducted with Al Jazeera in November 2009 and February 2010 \u2013 the latter specifically mentioning his view that it is permissible to target civilians.\u201d\u00a0 This just doesn\u2019t add up, they were monitoring his blog two years prior to this, and must have seen statements like those quoted above.<\/p>\n

Finally, a quick perusal of CagePrisoners\u2019 old website, which they continue to maintain, shows they have not yet decided to completely disassociate from al-Qaeda\u2019s newest star.\u00a0They continue to carry an article<\/a> by CagePrisoners member Fahad Ansari, bemoaning the decision to ban Awlaki\u2019s appearance at their August 2009 \u2018Beyond Guantanamo\u2019 event, which also praises him as an \u2018inspirational imam\u2019. Of course, as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Roshonara Choudhry have demonstrated, Ansari\u2019s words here hold more resonance than he likely meant them to.\u00a0\u00a0 Another Awlaki speech also remains<\/a> on their old site.<\/p>\n

For anyone who can bear to listen to any more of this, tune in to BBC Radio Five Live around 9pm this Sunday where I will be discussing Awlaki, CagePrisoners and his time in the UK in 2003.<\/p>\n

focusonislamism[at]standpointmag[dot]co[dot]uk<\/p>\n

@focusonislamism<\/p>\n

<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

No related posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s Daily Telegraph has featured research from a recent paper I co-authored with my former colleague, Jacob Amis, which covers, among other things, Anwar al-Awlaki’s time in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}