Bin Laden’s justification for 9/11 goes viral on TikTok in wake of Israel-Hamas war

The late Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden’s famous “Letter to America,” released one year after the September 11, 2001 attacks, has gone viral on the social media platform TikTok, with thousands of Western users expressing sympathy with the ideas expressed by one of the worst mass murderers of the 21st century.

“In reading the letter, I could only think of this tweet that I saw the other day,” one user declared, quoting a post on X which appeared to justify the October 7 attack on Israel. “Under settler colonialism, any kind of resistance is branded as terrorist because the only acceptable violence is violence by the occupier.”

“It’s actually so mind f***king to me that terrorism has been sold as this idea to the American people and honestly just so many Western inhabitants within certain nations that this group of people, this random group of people, just suddenly wakes up one day and just f***king hates you…like that is the root of terrorism,” another stated. “It doesn’t make sense… reading this letter, it becomes apparent to me that the actions of 9/11 and those acts committed against the USA and its people were the build up of our government failing other nations.”

A third contrasted her response to learning of Bin Laden’s death in 2011 with her “reading his letter to America, knowing he was right” in 2023.

Nearly 3,000 Americans died in the attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, sparking the “War on Terror” and two decades of conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

“Why are we fighting and opposing you,” Bin Laden asked in the letter, which attempted to justify the 9/11 attacks. “Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.”

“You attacked us in Palestine,” he stated, declaring that “the creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals,” adding that Israel’s very existence was “a crime which must be erased” and that “each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.”

“It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah. Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of antisemitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history,” he wrote.

“The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites. It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed,” he continued, railing against how western governments had allegedly “surrendered to the Jews.”

“There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of Al-Qaida issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history – highlighting them as his direct motivation for murdering 2,977 innocent Americans,” said White House Deputy Spokesperson Andrew Bates. “And no one should ever insult the 2,977 American families still mourning loved ones by associating themselves with the vile words of Osama bin Laden.”

“Particularly now, at a time of rising antisemitic violence in the world, and just after Hamas terrorists carried out the worst slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust in the name of the same conspiracy theories,” Bates continued, adding “like President Biden said this year in remembrance of the Americans who lost their lives because of Osama bin Laden, ‘it’s more important now than ever that we come together’ against a ‘rising tide of hatred and extremism.'”

After the letter went viral on Wednesday, The Guardian newspaper removed it from its website.

The spread of the letter online comes as the number of antisemitic incidents in the United States has more than quadrupled since the beginning of last month, according to figures published Monday by the Anti-Defamation League. Antisemitism has also flourished online, especially on X, whose owner, Elon Musk, on Wednesday appeared to endorse the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, the bizarre idea that Jews are promoting immigration in order to dilute the white population so as to recreate society.