Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ goes viral as some youths make ties to Israel-Hamas warfare
A 2002 letter written by Osama bin Laden making an attempt to justify the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults he masterminded has been spreading on TikTok, and a few customers are drawing connections between the letter and the Israel-Hamas warfare.
The “Letter to America” went viral after TikTok customers started linking to a replica that was translated and printed by The Guardian in November 2002.
The left-wing British newspaper has since eliminated the letter as a result of the web page in query now says, “the text was had been widely shared on social media without the full context.”
“Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it,” the web page now says.
TikTok additionally started to behave in opposition to it, however the cat was now out of the bag as a result of customers had repeatedly taken screen-shots of a part of the letter’s textual content.
The movies shared on the app have garnered over 14 million views, CNN reported, however now searches with the hashtag #lettertoamerica convey up no outcomes after TikTok stated it violates their pointers.
Some customers on TikTok stated the letter made them take a look at the U.S. authorities in a foul means, particularly when bin Laden talked concerning the Palestinians and America’s assist for Israel.
In one video, the consumer says she “will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same,” including that she’s going via an existential disaster.
Bin Laden’s championing of the Palestinians was broadly dismissed on the time as a result of his Al Qaeda terrorist group was primarily an enemy of Saudi Arabia, not Israel.
It turned in opposition to the U.S. and plotted Sept. 11 and different terrorist assaults over the stationing of American forces within the kingdom through the first Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, supposedly a Crusader defilement of the “Land of the Holy Mosques.”
The bin Laden letter tries to justify killing folks and makes direct references to the Quran.
It additionally accuses the United States of hypocrisy for imprisoning folks in Guantanamo Bay with out trials when the nation claims “to be the vanguards of human rights,” amongst different factors.
In a press release posted Thursday, TikTok stated, “Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”
The firm additionally stated the movies concerning the letter weren’t trending, with just a few circulating on the app, and that it wasn’t only a TikTok pattern.
“The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate,” the publish stated. “This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
While the letter is being seen for the primary time by the youthful generations, which comprise a lot of TikTok’s customers, members of the older generations are reacting harshly to the kids’ views on the letter.
Peter Bergen, a CNN nationwide safety analyst, instructed the outlet that he finds the circulation of the letter “puzzling.”
“Most of the people were either not born or were very young children when Bin Laden and 9/11 happened, so they don’t have much historical context,” he stated to CNN, including that, “there’s no proof it was written by bin Laden and some of the things that he focuses on are inconsistent with his other writings.”
