View it here.

At slide 11 he discusses fatwas concerning Muslims serving in the US military. It concludes with a quotation whose origins are unclear:

“It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”

From slide 17  (a bit of a false start, he actually commences the discussion properly at slide 35) he starts to discuss abrogation. Hasan gives the Jihad Watch style simplistic definition that peaceful verses tended to come earlier, and there is a later passage allowing violence against non-believers (the so-called ‘Sword Verse’ – 9:05) and therefore Muslims are allowed to fight offensive jihad.

The most crucial and concerning slides are number 45, titled “Offensive Islam if [sic] the Future”, and 48 – where Hasan lists comments. These include:

If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the “infidels”; ie: enemies of Islam, then Muslims can become a potent adversary ei: suicide bombing, etc.

And:

We love death more than you love life!

Comments continue on slide 49:

Muslims may be seen as moderate (compromising) but God is not.

And:

Fighting to establish an Islamic state to please God, even by force, is condoned by the [sic] Islam

This leads Hasan to conclude that Muslim soldiers should be allowed to opt out of fighting against other Muslims as “conscientious objectors” (slide 50).

How could the US military have missed signs this obvious? And what other signs has it been missing elsewhere?

Aulaqi said Hasan viewed him as a confidant. “It was clear from his e-mails that Nidal trusted me. Nidal told me: ‘I speak with you about issues that I never speak with anyone else,’ ” he told Shaea.

The cleric said Hasan informed him that he had become a devout Muslim around the time Aulaqi was preaching at Dar al-Hijrah, in 2001 and 2002. “Anwar said, ‘Maybe Nidal was affected by one of my lectures,’” said Shaea.

Now, Osama Saeed, Islamic Forum Europe and others may be on the defensive but Awlaki certainly isn’t. Speaking to an intermediary for the Washington Post, he affirmed his support for Nidal’s murderous rampage:

Explaining why he wrote on his Web site that Hasan was a “hero,” According to Shaea, Aulaqi said: “I blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were not normal soldiers, but those who were trained and prepared to go to Afghanistan and Iraq.” [...]

Aulaqi said Hasan’s alleged shooting spree was allowed under Islam because it was a form of jihad. “There are some people in the United States who said this shooting has nothing to do with Islam, that it was not permissible under Islam,” he said, according to Shaea. “But I would say it is permissible. . . . America was the one who first brought the battle to Muslim countries.”

The cleric also denounced what he described as contradictory behavior by Muslims who condemned Hasan’s actions and “let him down.” According to Shaea, he said: “They say American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan should be killed, so how can they say the American soldier should not be killed at the moment they are going to Iraq and Afghanistan?”

And, although the email relationship between Awlaki and Nidal seems to have been made up of a dozen or so emails from Nidal and just two or three from Awlaki, there is a suggestion that Awlaki may have been tailoring the contents of his blog to try to influence Nidal.

On Dec. 23, 2008, days after he said Hasan first e-mailed him, Aulaqi also posted online words encouraging attacks on U.S. soldiers, writing: “The bullets of the fighters of Afghanistan and Iraq are a reflection of the feelings of the Muslims towards America,” according to the NEFA Foundation, a private South Carolina group that monitors extremist Web sites.

Whatever the true extent of the relationship between Awlaki and Nidal, the fact that Nidal first adopted extremist ideas back in 2001 whilst under Awlaki’s influence shows us that people who claim that Awlaki was a moderate in the years between being a “spiritual advisor” to the 9/11 hijackers and him reprising that role with Nidal are horribly ill-informed, mad or bad. Or all three. Awlaki may have got more extreme in that period, but Nidal still thought to go to him in the months before shooting to death 13 soldiers.

So effective and ruthless is CAIR that anyone in authority worries before doing anything that can be misrepresented as anti-Muslim and lead to lawsuits citing religious or racial discrimination.

And here is a clear example of how this intimidation borne of victimhood works:

A good example of how CAIR has put the fear of Allah into American society is the case of the flying imams. Three years ago, at Minneapolis airport, some passengers and crew on US Airways Flight 300 were alarmed by six imams whose suspicious behaviour included praying loudly, changing seats and two of them demanding seatbelt extensions which they did not use; an Arabic-speaker on the flight heard two of them mention Osama bin Laden and condemn America for “killing Saddam”. They were removed from the flight by airport police, detained, questioned and released.

CAIR backed the imams’ claim that they had suffered from religious discrimination and underwrote their lawsuits against the airline, the law-enforcers and unnamed passengers who had reported them to the crew. Congress banned the suing of airline passengers who report on suspicious activity, but after a bizarre judicial ruling that no competent law enforcer could have thought their treatment reasonable, the airline and the law-enforcers settled out of court last month. The consequences for airline security are terrifying.

Rather surprisingly, a few days ago the American government had the guts to seize mosques and property owned by a group it claims are a front for the Iranian government. This, said CAIR ominously, “may send a negative message to Muslims worldwide.”

The hope is that it may send the positive message that enough is enough.

Absolutely right.

The saga of an armed custodian of military power turning roguish, whether out of stress or conviction, is not new. Just 25 years ago, there was the incident of the Prime Minister’s own bodyguards turning their guns on the person they were entrusted to protect. The reason was not any personal dislike of Indira Gandhi but a political (or, if you must, religious) retribution for the military action on the Golden Temple in Amritsar. A few months earlier there were incidents of mutiny among Sikh soldiers unable to digest the desecration of their holiest shrine. In weighing a perceived injustice to their faith with loyalty to the state, individuals exercised painful options — and only a handful involved rebellion.

It is more than likely that similar conflicts preyed on the mind of the gunman in Fort Hood as he sprayed bullets on his colleagues shouting Allah-o-Akbar. In eschewing his personal future for the cause of jihad, Nidal was acting in the same way as countless suicide bombers who have joined the martyrdom queue. Driven by a deep sense of religiosity, these individuals sincerely believe that they are serving god by killing themselves and others. Their motives are very different from the ones that propelled Indira’s bodyguards. Beant and Satwant didn’t believe they were heralding a better society. Nor were they guided by theology. They shot the Prime Minister to protest against the disrespect to the holiest of Sikh shrines. Their actions were located in the tradition of blood feuds that abound in rural societies.

This distinction is crucial. It is a colossal mistake to locate the so-called Islamist rage in specific grievances such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine (the expedient default grievance). Last week, Ayatollah Abdolhossein Moezi, the representative of the Iranian ‘Supreme Leader’ in Britain, fuelled a controversy by suggesting that Muslims shouldn’t be a part of the armed forces of countries that are in conflict with fellow Muslims. “We say that Muslims are not allowed to go and kill Muslims,” he pronounced grandly.

The argument is disingenuous. If Muslims were theologically forbidden from killing other Muslims, as the Ayatollah claimed, a trigger-happy Iranian police wouldn’t have killed so many fellow Shias protesting against something as innocuous as a rigged presidential election. Nor would suicide bombing have become a cottage industry in Pakistan, considering that nearly 90 per cent of those killed are invariably Muslims. There has to some theological underpinning to acts of murder that inflict so much collateral damage on Muslims.

[...]

[Anwar al-Awlaki] implies that no Muslim can be part of any outfit that opposed the Islamist jihad. This may explain why the Pakistani Army, which tries to play a double game, is considered a legitimate target.

But there is an even more sinister message in al-Awlaki’s endorsement of the Fort Hood massacre. It implies that all Muslims, regardless of which passport they hold and where they live, are bound by a common obligation to their god. Their duty, in other words, is to facilitate the global jihad of Islamism and forget about national obligations.

It would not be surprising if, inspired by Nidal, clerics in European countries where there are large Muslim populations, issue similar decrees. More to the point, how long before the patriotism of India’s Muslim soldiers are put to a similar warped test? After all, there is ongoing battle between Indian nationhood and jihad.

His conclusion is one with which few followers of the Spittoon will disagree:

In India, the motivations behind Indira’s killings were instantly recognised and, in our own blundering way, acted upon. In the case of Fort Hood, there is a strange reluctance to admit all traces of an ideological virus which can potentially devastate society and even cause civil strife. There is a global radicalisation of Muslims which has its roots in the convergence of religion and political power. To try and overcome it with competitive theology — countering one religious quotation with another — and multiculturalism are unlikely to work. On the contrary, the battle will be on terms desired by the Islamists. It is time we seriously explore whether religious radicalisation can be offset by a dogmatic refusal to concede any space to religion in political life. It’s not easy but various alternative approaches haven’t succeeded.

In every country which faces political violence justified with invocations to some deity political leaders are needed who have the courage to deny religion a space in political life. We need secularism. This is not to say that individuals guided by a personal religious faith should be denied a voice in politics, of course not. Rather, we must not play the game of accepting as political arguments that we should enact law X or pursue policy Y because it is the correct thing to do according to religion Z.

Political leaders may think they are being cunning in trying to play Islamists at their own game. However, so long as they accept the Islamists’ rule that public policy should be decided by theological arguments, this is a game the Islamists will win.

Yet more evidence of the links between them? Probably not, but it’s always worth noting the dubious personal morality of the ostentatiously pious.

Well, now Awlaki has responded to the shooting with an entry entitled Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing (pdf) on his blog. I reproduce it below in the hope that people in various capacities in government (central and local), the media and more will become familiar with this man and never again will he be able to sully a venue in Britain.

Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam. Its army is directly invading two Muslim countries and indirectly occupying the rest through its stooges.

Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.

The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation. Many amongst them are choosing the former. The Muslim organizations in America came out in a pitiful chorus condemning Nidal’s operation.

The fact that fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today cannot be disputed. No scholar with a grain of Islamic knowledge can defy the clear cut proofs that Muslims today have the right -rather the duty- to fight against American tyranny. Nidal has killed soldiers who were about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to kill Muslims. The American Muslims who condemned his actions have committed treason against the Muslim Ummah and have fallen into hypocrisy.

Allah(swt) says: Give tidings to the hypocrites that there is for them a painful punishment –
Those who take disbelievers as allies instead of the believers. Do they seek with them honor [through power]? But indeed, honor belongs to Allah entirely. (al-Nisa 136-137)

The inconsistency of being a Muslim today and living in America and the West in general reveals the wisdom behind the opinions that call for migration from the West. It is becoming more and more difficult to hold on to Islam in an environment that is becoming more hostile towards Muslims.

May Allah grant our brother Nidal patience, perseverance and steadfastness and we ask Allah to accept from him his great heroic act. Ameen

Despite being a US citizen himself, he thinks Major Hasan is a “hero” and his slaughter of soldiers relaxing “a heroic act”. People must have no illusions about who Awlaki is.

Whilst Sunny, Harry’s Place and many more speculate about what lay behind Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murderous rampage in Fort Hood, the Huffington Post carries a piece written by Kamran Pasha, who has a Muslim soldier friend, Richard, who knew Hasan. It contains a fascinating and troubling detail.

As Richard got to know Hasan better over the next several months, he found the major to be a pious man who was at the mosque daily. But Richard also began to garner a sense of Hasan’s political views that troubled him. A black-and-white outlook on Islam and life that had no room for nuance or debate. Hasan had apparently attended a mosque led by an imam named Anwar Al-Awlaki, a Yemeni scholar whose political views Richard disagrees with.

Awlaki is a controversial figure among Muslims, and has been accused by the Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11 of serving as a “spiritual advisor” to two of the September 11 hijackers. While Richard is careful to say that he respects much of Awlaki’s historical scholarship, he rejects his political ideology, which posits a black-and-white, us versus them, view of America’s relationship with the Islamic world. [...]

Richard does not know how heavily Hasan was influenced by fundamentalist thinkers like Awlaki. But the major’s views were definitely troubling. Richard described an incident where Hasan made some anti-Semitic comments about Jews as a nation being “cursed by God” in Islam. Richard responded that the Qur’an does not condemn any group of people collectively, and that no one is born “cursed” by their ancestry.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kamran-pasha/a-muslim-soldiers-view-fr_b_348973.html&cp

That would be the same mosque that some of the 9/11 hijackers attended and the same Awlaki whose support of an al-Qaeda style ideology has long been documented. Wikipedia steps in:

9/11 hijackers Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hazmi came into contact with al Awlaki at the Rabat mosque in San Diego, though The 9/11 Commission Report notes that “We do not know how or when Hazmi and Midhar first met” him.

According to The 9/11 Commission Report, the two “may even have met or at least talked to him the same day they first moved to San Diego.” Al Midhar and al Hazmi “reportedly respected al Awlaki as a religious figure and developed a close relationship with him.” The Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11 labels al Awlaki “their spiritual advisor” and asserts that there were reports of “closed-door meetings” involving the three.

In January 2001, al Awlaki moved to Virginia and became the imam at the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, VA, a mosque with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In April 2001, al Hamzi and fellow hijacker Hani Hanjour showed up at Dar al Hijrah. The 9/11 Commission Report asserts that al Hazmi’s “appearance may not have been coincidental. We have unable to learn enough about al Awlaki’s relationship with Hazmi and Midhar to reach a conclusion.”

The Toronto Star recently had this to say about Awlaki:

Anwar al Awlaki preached in perfect Arabic and flawless English about the need to fight in the name of religion, because the “world is united in fighting Islam.”

The time for jihad is now, no matter your training, he told members of the group that would later become known as the Toronto 18. Six months following that “training camp,” those youths were rounded up in Canada’s largest post-9/11 terrorism investigation and charged with plotting to blow up downtown Toronto and military targets.

Zakaria Amara, the leader of that group, entered a surprise guilty plea earlier this month. A date for his sentencing is to be set on Tuesday.

Awlaki’s role in allegedly inciting “homegrown terrorism” was just a footnote in the volumes of evidence submitted in the Toronto case.

But in recent months, as Awlaki’s name has popped up in terrorism cases in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, intelligence services are closely monitoring the U.S.-born cleric.

“Awlaki is an exceptionally smart person,” says FBI consultant and terrorism researcher Evan Kohlmann, who has studied the 38-year-old for years. “He has the strongest statements of any English-language site.”

And this, from a New York Times article about Somalis from America being recruited to fight for al-Qaeda allies al-Shabab:

Mr. Hassan’s interest in the Islamist movement dovetailed with his own religious transformation, friends said. In the fall of 2007 he began downloading sermons onto his iPod and soon was attending the Abubakar mosque.

By then, Mr. Hassan had become upset by the reports of rapes in Somalia and set out to learn more about the insurgency, one friend recalled. He began talking of joining the movement as early as February 2008, around the same time that a friend from the mosque — Mr. Maruf, the former gang member — left for Somalia.

“I wanted to go, so I got to know him,” Mr. Hassan said in a recent telephone conversation from Somalia with a Minneapolis friend.

That May, he was incensed by a United States military air strike that killed Aden Hashi Ayro, a leader of the Shabaab, along with at least 10 civilians. “How dare they?” Mr. Hassan demanded one afternoon at the student center. “Who is the terrorist?”

Mr. Hassan and another university student searched the Internet for jihadist videos and chat rooms, the friend said. They listened to “Constants on the Path to Jihad,” lectures by the Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is suspected of inciting Muslims in the West to violence.

Whether Major Hasan’s actions were motivated by insanity or a jihadist ideology is a debate which will no doubt play out for a while, but his connection to Anwar al-Awlaki could well be a crucial detail casting light on this terrible affair.

-

UPDATE:

The Telegraph has picked up on this story.

Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. His mother’s funeral was held there in May that year.

The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.

Hasan’s eyes “lit up” when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday’s horrific shooting spree.

As investigators look at Hasan’s motives and mindset, his attendance at the mosque could be an important piece of the jigsaw. Al-Awlaki moved to Dar al-Hijrah as imam in January, 2001, from the west coast, and three months later the September 11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour began attending his services. A third hijacker attended his services in California.

Hasan was praying at Dar al-Hijrah at about the same time, and the FBI will now want to investigate whether he met the two terrorists.

Charles Allen, a former under-secretary for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, has described al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, as an “al-Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers… who targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen”.