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.

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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”.

WASHINGTON–President Barack Obama on Saturday pledged to end a 16-year-old policy banning gay people from serving openly in the nation’s military, in a gesture to a group that provided a major source of support during his campaign.

But the president didn’t set out a timetable for reversing the policy. As a result, his pledge might not be enough to appease some in the gay community who feel that Mr. Obama hasn’t moved quickly enough to address their issues — even as his message could spark criticism from some conservatives and members of the military.

Speaking at a human-rights dinner in the capital, Mr. Obama vowed to end the Clinton-era “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which allows homosexuals to serve in the military, as long as they don’t disclose their sexual orientation or act on it.

The law has long been criticized by gay-rights advocates as a half-measure that doesn’t fully recognize the rights and contributions of gay service-men and women. Mr. Obama has in the past said he would work to overturn the policy.

“We cannot afford to discharge people from our ranks with critical skills,” he told a cheering crowd of about 3,000 at the black-tie event sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay civil-rights group.

Mr. Obama also appealed to Congress to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which limits how state and federal bodies can recognize domestic partnerships in providing government benefits. He also vowed to press for legislation that would extend health and other employment benefits to domestic partners of workers. But he again didn’t provide a timetable.

Mr. Obama’s statements are likely to be welcomed by many liberal Democrats, although some activists criticized his failure to provide more concrete details.

Kevin Nix, spokesman for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which represents gay and lesbian members of the military, said the president did little more than repeat his campaign pledge on the issue.  “He missed an opportunity tonight” to set a timetable, Mr. Nix said. “We’d like a bill in Congress in 2010.”

Mr. Obama’s comments could also spark criticism from conservatives and some supporters who say the administration must set priorities, as the nation grapples with continued high unemployment, a recession, and two wars.

Any attempt to change government policy concerning gay people could further divide an already polarized Congress. The administration needs lawmakers’ cooperation to pass legislation to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, a top priority for Mr. Obama. The administration is also trying to secure passage of new financial-industry regulations and could turn to Congress to request more troops in Afghanistan.

Congress passed the law popularly known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 1993. Subsequent efforts by then-President Bill Clinton to repeal it ran into opposition from the military and Congress, which after 1994, was controlled by Republicans.

It’s far from clear when, or if, Mr. Obama’s pledge would have any practical impact on the armed forces. Besides that the president didn’t give a timeline for his pledge, eliminating the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule would also require congressional action. Lawmakers may be unwilling to take up such a politically contentious issue while they tackle health-care legislation and other matters.

Advocates of repealing the rule point to polling data showing that service personnel have become far more accepting of homosexuality, suggesting that such a move could be less disruptive today than it would have been in the 1990s. At least 13,500 personnel have been discharged since 1994 over their sexual orientation, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a nonprofit group working to repeal the ban.

A 2006 Zogby poll found that three-quarters of the military personnel surveyed said they were comfortable around gays and lesbians, while 78% said they would join the military even if gays were allowed to serve openly. Just under 25% of the respondents said they knew someone in their own unit who was gay.

Supporters of maintaining the regulation point to other polls which show more discomfort towards homosexuality within military ranks. A Military Times poll late last year found that 58% of the respondents opposed repealing the ban. Even within the Military Times poll, however, 71% of the respondents said they would continue to serve if the policy were repealed.

Mr. Obama, who spokes for about 25 minutes, told the crowd that he came to the gay community with a simple message: “I’m here with you in that fight….My commitment to you is unwavering.”

Introducing Mr. Obama, Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese told the crowd, “We have never had a stronger ally in the White House. Never.”

Richard Socarides, who had advised the Clinton administration on gay and lesbian policy, told the Associated Press that Mr. Obama delivered “a strong speech in tone, although only vaguely reassuring in content.”

“The president and Nobel winner came and paid his respects, but tomorrow many will ask: What’s his plan, what’s his timetable,” Mr. Socarides said.

Other special interest groups that contributed to, and campaigned for, Mr. Obama, such as unions and Latino voters, have begun to question when he will address issues important to their members, such as legislation to facilitate union organizing at the workplace and an overhaul of immigration law.

Mr. Obama acknowledged some in the crowd believe that he hasn’t done enough so far to address issues facing the gay community. But he said, “Do not doubt the direction we are headed and the destination we will reach.”

“We have made progress and we will make more,” Mr. Obama said.

The president also referenced the House’s move this week to widen hate-crimes legislation and make it a federal crime to assault people based on their sexual orientation.

He offered a tribute to Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was tortured and killed 11 years ago in Wyoming because of his sexual orientation, igniting a nation-wide drive for expanded hate-crimes legislation. Mr. Shepard’s parents, Judy and Dennis, were on hand to accept the first Edward M. Kennedy National Leadership Award, presented by Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D., R.I.).

Mr. Obama said the administration was also addressing the continuing problem of HIV/AIDS. Guests at the $250-a-plate dinner included musical actor Gavin Creel, singer Lady Gaga and cast members of the television show Glee.

A doctor who was one of the few in the US to continue carrying out late-term abortions was shot dead in a church today.

George Tiller, 67, who had been picketed, bombed and shot in the arms in previous incidents, was killed at his church in Kansas, according to police sources.

His was one of only three clinics in the United States to carry out late-term abortions, which are legal in Kansas if two independent doctors agree that the mother would be irreparably harmed should the pregnancy be allowed to continue.

Tiller was a controversial man, whose clinic has been the site of protests for two decades. He was shot and wounded by a protester in 1993 and someone placed a bomb on the roof of the clinic in 1986, seriously damaging the building.

If, as seems likely, this “pro-life” murderer was motivated by religious feeling then this detail is particularly worth noting.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation.

Tiller was serving as an usher at the church, one of six ushers listed in the church bulletin. He was handing out bulletins to people going into the sanctuary minutes before being shot.

A church member who did not want to be identified said the gunman threatened another person at the church after the shooting.

As with many other brands of religious extremism, the hypocrisy is agonising.

“He’s a strange kid,” Rashada said. “He had a lot of psychological problems.”

Rashada is a senior life coach with the program and was working with Payen. He also encouraged him to attend Friday prayers at Masjid al-Ikhlas in Newburgh where Rashada is an assistan imam. Payen had told him he was Muslim, and Rashada figured he must have been introduced to Islam in prison. Misunderstandings of the teachings can occur in places such as prison, Rashada said, because educated teachers may be rarer. Rashada said at the Newburgh mosque, they worked to put teachings in their proper context. Payen attended only occasionally, however, he said.

“I guess when he got bored out here on the street,” Rashada said.

When Payen did come, he would try to impress other members of the mosque by spouting supposed knowledge of Islam, Rashada said. Often, he was so far off in his statements Rashada would have to correct him in front of people. Payen would go quiet then and wander off. He seemed passive to Rashada. Strange, yes, but never violent.

He continues.

Rashada said he didn’t know either Williams, and Cromitie’s [other suspects] name was only vaguely familiar. (“I can’t put a face with a name.”) He knew Payen best through the Transition Center. He could picture how all the sudden attention would go as people rushed to find a link from the suspects to a mosque and extremist Islam. It upset him.
“It’s disgustingly irresponsible,” he said.

He quoted a teaching for the Koran that says a person who saves on person saves all of humanity. And a person who kills another person kills all of humanity. He said they teach that at the mosque. Payen, he said, rarely attended.

UPDATE:
Back in February Raffaello Pantucci of IISS wrote a CIF piece on the topic of radicalisation and the growth of Muslim gangs in British prison. Read it here.

UPDATE 2:
And the ringleader got stoned in preparation for the big event.