Pulling the plug on terror TV

Abetter-late-than-never pat on the back to Google’s YouTube for purging by the thousands videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, the English-speaking cleric whose sermons urge Americans to take up arms against their country. If you’re paying attention, you know that the chief terrorist threat today is posed not by hardened terrorists trained abroad and sent here to kill — but by so-called homegrown lone wolves, radicalized to commit violent jihad based on material they find on the internet.

Which is why as long as videos urging people to kill innocents remain readily available on the most popular platforms, more and more radical Islamists will commit deadly violence.

For years, YouTube hosted hundreds of poisonous Awlaki missives — in gross violation of its terms of service, which claim it “strictly prohibits content intended to recruit for terrorist organizations, incite violence, celebrate terrorist attacks or otherwise promote acts of terrorism.”

The service claimed it was just too hard to sift through billions of hours of content, and besides, considered some of his jihadist rants to be permissible political screeds.

Now, advanced video fingerprinting technology flags Awlaki’s videos automatically — and human reviewers quickly screen and block them before anyone even sees them.

Keep developing the tools, and use them aggressively against any and all terror recruiters.