Anwar al-Awlaki,

The only American executed under a presidential “targeted killing” order.

Al-Awlaki came to prominence as one of a bunch of self-appointed radical Imams with links to the 9/11 attacks.  His US citizenship, engineering degree from Colorado and mosque in San Diego made him newsworthy.   The evidence against him was only circumstantial and he didn’t relish taking the rap, so he condemned the attack as un-Islamic, got a short-lived reputation as a moderate, and skipped off to Britain.   Soon he was calling again for jihad among the sillier fringes of Islamic student groups, and setting up all sorts of internet propaganda pages.  By 2004 even the tolerant Brits were hacked off, so he decamped to Yemen, where his father is a senior politician.

His Western knowledge and perfect English inspired many new recruits, including the perpetrators of the 2005 London bombings, and before long he had a popular Facebook page and videos on You Tube.  This pissed off Osama bin Laden who had neither.   It also pissed off Barak Obama, who might have turned a blind eye – all religions have barmy clerics calling on followers to kill unbelievers – but couldn’t ignore his actions.  He organised two failed bombings – flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and the UPS bomb plot against Chicago synagogues.  His fingerprints were on the Times Square bombing, and the Fort Hood massacre.  Earlier this year Obama lost patience and ordered the CIA to kill him any way they liked.  On Sept 30^th, a drone got him.

His father protested that he was just an all American boy, and the usual bleeding hearts fretted over lack of due process.   But the simple souls who he led astray, and the innocents who would sooner or later have been killed should be delighted.

Imam Al-Awlaki was no great scholar
Not even top dog in the Al Quaeda
But he authorised bombers on his mobile phone
So Obama blew him up with an unmanned drone.

Let this be a lesson to all you clerics
Blog what you like to us agnostics
But killing the innocent is so uncool
You’ll soon get a write up on our Deadpool

Jim Thornton

Forthcoming on AO Deadpool Click here