Ebrahim Moosa – Radio Islam News | 15 November 2017

A Youtube search for material of the late Imam Anwar al Awlaki today will show up far fewer results than barely a few days ago.

In an unprecedented move, the online video portal has removed thousands of videos of the slain Yemeni-American cleric, with insiders citing ‘counter-terrorism’ efforts as the motivation.

According to the New York Times, a search for Awlaki last year returned around 70 000 videos. The same search today returns less than 20 000, the vast majority of which are videos about Awlaki – the circumstances of his demise, reports about his life and refutations of his work – rather than material authored by him.

Significantly, not only was material relating to Jihad, and Awlaki’s calls, from the latter portion of his life, for action against America, censored. Awlaki’s popular series, based on classical Islamic sourceworks, on topics such as the Sirah of the Prophet SAW, the lives of the Khulafa, Stories of the Prophets and the Hereafter, also came under the axe.

A reasoning for the blanket ban that has been cited, is the apparently latent risk of any viewer of the ‘innocuous’ material progressing to the more ‘controversial’ output of Awlaki and thereby becoming ‘radicalised’.

It is reportedly the first time Google’s video site has taken such concerted action against a particular individual.

If he were alive today, Awlaki would have been banned from owning a YouTube channel because he was named as a terrorist on UK and US government lists.

According to the New York Times, YouTube said the initial decision to purge any particular video is made by human reviewers. But once that decision is made, a “hash function,” a kind of digital fingerprint, is created to automatically rid the site of additional copies of the same video.

Since as early as 2009, Youtube has been under sustained pressure from certain governments and counterterrorism lobbies to purge Awlaki’s videos of all kinds. The number of videos on YouTube presenting or celebrating his work more than doubled from 2014 to 2017, according to the Times. More than six years after his murder, he is still routinely referred to as the leading English-language “jihadist recruiter” by media and officials in the West.

Awlaki was killed on September 30, 2011, in northern Yemen’s al-Jawf province, by missiles fired from American Predator drones launched from Saudi Arabia.

Awlaki had, prior to his assassination, been placed by President Barack Obama on a list of people whom the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were authorized to kill because of their alleged “terrorist activities”. He became the first American citizen to be hunted down and killed without trial by his own government since the Civil War.

Awlaki’s 16 year old son, Abdulrahman, was also killed barely 2 weeks later in Yemen, in another CIA drone strike. And just this January, Awlaki’s 8 year old daughter, Nawar, bled to death after being shot at by an American marine in close range, at the village of Yakla, in Yemen’s al-Bayda province.