The text of an inflammatory “letter to America” from 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden has gone viral on TikTok and drawn praise from young users — and US lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are blasting the China-owned app for promoting “terrorist propaganda.”
In the letter, bin Laden claimed that he orchestrated the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center that killed nearly 3,000 Americans because the US “attacked us in Palestine.”
Bin Laden called the creation of Israel a “crime which must be erased.” He also claimed that the AIDS epidemic was “a Satanic American Invention” and objected to US companies allowing women to have jobs, fuming, “You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins.”
The antisemitic tirade went on to assert that in the US, Jews “control your policies, media and economy.”
The Guardian, which had published the full text of the letter in 2002, pulled it down on Wednesday,
citing the fact in a statement that it was being “widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the
news article that originally contextualized it instead.”
The TikTok trend appears to have been jumpstarted by Lynette Adkins — a social media influencer with 12 million followers who has been
profiled in the Los Angeles Times.
In her video, which has received nearly 100,000 likes and more than 5,500 comments since it was posted Wednesday, Adkins told her followers to “stop what they’re doing right now and go read a letter to America.”
Adkins followed up with several other posts, including one in which she discussed “three movies to watch after you’ve read ‘a letter to America’” and another in which she reacted to the Guardian taking down the text and declared “America is losing the PR war bad.”
“The Guardian taking that post down is actually one of the worst things that they could’ve done. I don’t know who was behind it or what the reasoning was, but I feel like it literally just confirmed everything that we read in the letter,” Adkins said.
When reached for comment, a TikTok spokesperson said “content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism” and added that the company was “proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”
At the same time, the company bizarrely tried to deny that the bin Laden-related content had gone viral — despite videos that racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
“The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate,” the spokesperson added. “This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
Many of the TikTok users promoting the letter were women.
A second said she would “never look at life the same, I will never look at this country the same. Please read it and if you have read it, let me know if you are also going through an existential crisis in this very moment, because in the last 20 minutes, the entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed and I have lived has changed.”
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