Responding to complaints from American and British officials, YouTube on Wednesday removed from its site some of the hundreds of videos featuring calls to jihad by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric based in Yemen who has been blamed for radicalizing Muslims involved in a string of terrorist attacks.
On Tuesday, amid concerns that the cleric might have been linked to a thwarted plot to bomb cargo jets, prosecutors in Yemen charged Mr. Awlaki in absentia with inciting violence by sending Internet messages to a 19-year-old Yemeni man, who is on trial for murdering a French oil company worker last month, urging him to kill foreigners.
Mr. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and raised in both Yemen and the United States, met at least one of the 9/11 hijackers at mosques in California and Washington before the attacks in 2001 and has described the Nigerian man who tried to ignite explosives in his underwear on a flight last year as “one of my students.”
But counterterrorism officials are most concerned with his virtual influence because his online calls for Western Muslims to embrace violent extremism, issued in video sermons and interviews in fluent English and Arabic, can be seen worldwide.
Last year, the cleric said in an interview that he had exchanged e-mail messages with the Army psychiatrist charged in the Fort Hood shootings. Earlier this year, Roshonara Choudhry, a 21-year-old British student who stabbed a member of Parliament in May because of his 2003 vote in favor of the Iraq war, told London police that she had been radicalized in part by listening to Mr. Awlaki “explaining stories from the Koran and explaining about jihad” online.
In a transcript of her interrogation after the stabbing, published by the Guardian, she explained the impact of watching “more than a hundred hours” of Mr. Awlaki’s sermons on YouTube:
Choudhry: I wanted to be a martyr.
Officer: Why’s that then?
Choudhry: ‘Cos, erm, that’s the best way to die.
Officer: Who told you that?
Choudhry: It’s an Islamic teaching.
Officer: Where did you learn that?
Choudhry: It’s … it’s in the Koran and I learnt it from listening to lectures as well.
Officer: OK, what lectures are that?
Choudhry: By Anwar al-Awlaki
Officer: al-Awlaki?
Choudhry: Yeah.
Officer: OK, well, how did you find out about him?
Choudhry: On the internet … if you go on YouTube there’s a lot of his videos there and if you do a search they just come up … I wasn’t searching for him, I just came across him … I used to watch videos that people used to put up about like how they became Muslim.
Officer: OK, why did you watch those videos?
Choudhry: Cos I thought … their life stories were interesting… And as you watch videos that like a whole other list of related videos comes up and I was just looking through those and I came across it.
Officer: Anwar al-Awlaki?
Choudhry: Yeah.
Officer: OK. So who put you, who guided down this path to, to look for, you know, the videos of people and how they become Muslim?
Choudhry: No one, I just found them really interesting … I became interested in Anwar al-Awlaki’s lectures because he explains things really comprehensively and in an interesting way so I thought I could learn a lot from him and I was also surprised at how little I knew about my religion so that motivated me to learn more.
Those Web sites would categorically not be allowed in the U.K. They incite cold-blooded murder and as such are surely contrary to the public good.
If they were hosted in the U.K. then we would take them down but this is a global problem. Many of these websites are hosted in America and we look forward to working even more closely with you to take down this hateful material.
I am asking that you remove all videos featuring Anwar al-Awlaki from your website and set up safeguards to prevent future videos of from being posted.
Hundreds of al-Awlaki videos are currently available on YouTube, with a combined total of over 3.5 million views. In these videos, al-Awlaki preaches violence against Americans and actions back up his online message….
I understand that YouTube is a clearing house for ideas and that your company aims to not infringe on free speech, but al-Awlaki’s message, promoted via YouTube, has caused violence and is a threat to American security. I request that you remove this man and his hateful rhetoric from your website, as he poses a clear and present danger to American citizens.
A spokesman for YouTube told The Lede:
YouTube has community guidelines that prohibit dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech, and incitement to commit violent acts. We also remove all videos and terminate any account registered by a member of a designated foreign terrorist organization [by the State Department] and used in an official capacity to further the interests of the F.T.O.
We have removed a significant number of videos under these policies. We’re now looking into the new videos that have been raised with us and will remove all those which break our rules. These are difficult issues, and material that is brought to our attention is reviewed carefully. We will continue to remove all content that incites violence according to our policies. Material of a purely religious nature will remain on the site.
On Tuesday, Yemen took a different approach to the problem of muzzling Mr. Awlaki, by pressing ahead with the trial of a journalist who had conducted interviews with the cleric, allowing him to speak in his own voice to readers of The Washington Post and Al Jazeera’s Web site.
As Reuters reported last week, prosecutors have accused the Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Hider Shaea, of “being an active Al Qaeda member” and “acting as a media secretary for the radical Muslim preacher.” Mohamed Allawo of Yemen’s National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, which is defending Mr. Shaea, said he was being prosecuted merely for doing “a journalist’s job of seeking information, whether this is information the government likes or not.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists, which issued a report in September, “In Yemen, Brutal Repression Cloaked in Law,” on the lack of press freedom in the country, noted that Mr. Shaea was “abducted by unidentified men” who claimed to be representing Yemen’s government in July, a month before he was arrested again in an armed raid on his home.
Days before his abduction, Mr. Shaea
: “In Yemen, you conceal your identity as a journalist. Your journalism I.D. is a liability, not an asset. It turns you into a target.”