WASHINGTON (NewsNation) — Osama bin Laden’s two-decade-old letter is recirculating on TikTok among a new generation, causing some to sympathize with the former al-Qaida leader.
Bin Laden penned the “Letter to America” to defend his masterminding of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The British newspaper The Guardian first published the letter in 2002 and has since deleted it from its website.
Bin Laden writes about his grievances against the western world, specifically the United States and its staunch support for Israel.
It also argues the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Arlington, Virginia and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were justified because al-Qaida was fighting for oppressed Palestinians against the Israel-supporting West.
Bin Laden was killed in 2011 by U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six.
The letter resurfaced recently on TikTok, which is popular with younger generations, and some users said it opened their eyes to the Israel-Hamas war.
In one video, which has amassed more than 1.1 million views, a TikTok user made the claim: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.”
A White House spokesman slammed the TikTok trend in a statement, calling it an “insult” to family members of the victims of 9/11.
“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,” deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told NewsNation.
“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,” Bates continued. “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.”
In a statement posted Thursday, on X, formerly known as Twitter, TikTok said the letter “clearly” violates its rules on supporting terrorism.
“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,” TikTok said.
The company also clarified that the content did not reflect a viral trend, but rather a small number of posts on the platform. “The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.”
By Thursday afternoon, searches on the site for “Osama bin Laden” and “Letter to America” showed a “no results found” error message. Some old links, though, still allow viewers to watch the videos.
