Ongoing media cover-up in previously promoting Al-Qaeda imam Anwar Al-Awlaki as a moderate: New York Times edition

Ongoing media cover-up in previously promoting Al-Qaeda imam Anwar Al-Awlaki as a moderate: New York Times edition

An article in yesterday's New York Times, "Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad", is yet another example of how the establishment media is attempting to white-wash their past complicity in promoting Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki as a moderate. Here is the setup by the Times:

A contrasting version of Mr. Awlaki’s story, explored though never confirmed by the national Sept. 11 commission, maintains that he was a secret agent of Al Qaeda starting well before the attacks, when three of the hijackers turned up at his mosques. By this account, all that has changed since then is that Mr. Awlaki has stopped hiding his true views.

The tale that emerges from visits to his mosques, and interviews with two dozen people who knew him, is more complex and elusive. A product both of Yemen’s deeply conservative religious culture and freewheeling American ways, he hesitated to shake hands with women but patronized prostitutes. He was first enthralled with jihad as a teenager — but the cause he embraced, the defeat of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, was then America’s cause too. After a summer visit to the land of the victorious mujahedeen, he brought back an Afghan hat and wore it proudly around the Colorado State campus in Fort Collins where he studied engineering.

Later, Mr. Awlaki seems to have tried out multiple personas: the representative of a tolerant Islam in a multicultural United States (starring in a WashingtonPost.com video explaining Ramadan); the fiery American activist talking about Muslims’ constitutional rights (and citing both Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown); the conspiracy theorist who publicly doubted the Muslim role in the Sept. 11 attacks. (The F.B.I., he wrote a few days afterward, simply blamed passengers with Muslim names.)

Ah, you see, when you look at the matter objectively, the NYT authors claim, understanding his shift in public rhetoric is "complex and elusive". Why must they exclude the possibility (one accepted by the 9/11 Commission) that al-Awlaki was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent? Because after 9/11, Awlaki was one of the "moderates" that the establishment media turned to for understanding the "Muslim" perspective on the terror attacks. To admit that they were duped strikes at their continued credibility on terrorism. The New York Times and Washington Post are the biggest culprits in this.

Click on the title above to read the whole story at Jawa Report.