The “Letter to America” written by Osama bin Laden went viral on social media this week, shared by people who claimed the terrorist’s arguments precipitated an “existential crisis” and caused them to rethink everything they thought they knew. Honestly, we should have seen this coming.
Since Hamas attacked Israel last month, the progressive Left has consistently reminded us that this — terrorism — is what decolonization looks like. It was only a matter of time before leftists gave Osama bin Laden the same adulation as they do postcolonial thinkers Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. Sure, he orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, injured more than 6,000 others, and fundamentally transformed American life — but, like, maybe the government just wants us to think that he was the bad guy.
Terrorist Prompts ‘Existential Crisis’
Bin Laden’s newest fans have taken to TikTok to share his “Letter to America,” in which he explains why al-Qaeda attacked the United States. According to these social media users, his letter is a revelation: “It explains so much, and I guarantee it’s going to blow your mind.”
Now trending on social media (especially TikTok) people saying that after reading Bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” they now understand terrorism is a legitimate method of resistance against “oppression” and America deserved to be attacked of 9/11
Video Credit: @yashar pic.twitter.com/O5bemdTDzw
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 16, 2023
“It’s wild, and everyone should read it…. However, be forewarned that this has left me very disillusioned,” said one person.
“I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same…. Please read it,” another person implored. “In the last 20 minutes, my entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed and I have lived has changed.” (RELATED: The Greatest Hypocrites Are Among Us)
But it seems far from likely that bin Laden’s letter truly prompted an awakening. Instead, the TikTok trend is yet another instance where progressives have retrofitted the narrative du jour onto the past and called it “enlightenment.” Many of these TikTok users admit to only recently learning that bin Laden had written his justification for the 9/11 terror attacks.
Let’s be honest: Anyone who is convinced so rapidly by the terrorist’s letter jettisoned any sense of patriotism long ago.
Bin Laden Was Bad, Actually
After bin Laden’s “Letter to America” went viral on Wednesday, the Guardian removed the text from its website, where it had been available since November 2002. The letter is still available through digital caches and can be read in full here.
When you read the letter, it’s easy to see why liberals have a newfound awe for the terrorist. Bin Laden writes to answer two questions posed by Americans: “Why are we [al-Qaeda] fighting and opposing you?”; and “What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?” He begins the letter with a diatribe in defense of Palestine, calling the creation of Israel “one of the greatest crimes.”
“Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily,” he writes, employing the same logic of collective guilt that the Left has used to push its radical agenda in recent years. Progressives on TikTok rightly sense a commonality between bin Laden’s rhetoric and their newfound fervor for Palestine. If they’re unable to distinguish decolonization rhetoric from Islamist jihad, perhaps it’s because both movements are absolutist crusades waged by true believers. (READ MORE: TikTok Needs to Be Destroyed)
In some paragraphs, bin Laden sounds like a proto-BLM agitator. “It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind,” he writes. “The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only.”
But the enemy of your enemy isn’t necessarily your friend. Bin Laden hated Israel and resented the United States for its involvement in the Middle East, as do contemporary leftists. The similarities end there.
Bin Laden’s letter isn’t a postcolonial essay; it’s an Islamist tirade giving the ultimatum to convert or die. Sure, he writes about the obligation to overthrow oppressive regimes, but it seems that our friends on TikTok missed the rest of that sentence: “The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step … to make the Shariah the supreme law.” He further condemns the United States as a viper’s nest rife with “the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.” Again, not exactly in tune with today’s liberal zeitgeist.
The Left’s Victimhood Complex
If bin Laden’s zealotry cuts against the very core of modern progressivism, then why is it percolating on the left at all? It seems that the trend isn’t really about the terrorist. Those who parrot him simply wanted a way to make the ongoing conflict in Israel all about themselves. Ideological discrepancies don’t matter because bin Laden is just the latest avatar for their personal victimhood.
One TikTok user had a few choice words about the letter to illustrate this point:
It’s actually so mindf***ing 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 … just suddenly wakes up one day and just f***ing hates you.
“This letter was insanely eye-opening.… I thought that I had quite a lot of media literacy, but this takes it to whole other f***ing level,” she concluded.
“We’ve been lied to our entire lives,” wrote a 25-year-old user in a TikTok video that is no longer publicly available. Another user wrote, “They really want us to stay ignorant.”
When you can only conceive of reality as a dialectic between the oppressor and the oppressed (and when you conveniently always fall into the “oppressed” category), things go topsy-turvy quite quickly. These people already believed our nation to be an evil empire, and they already saw themselves as the victims of America — just think back to 2020. So when they’re confronted with terrorism, all they can say is: “Like, everything he said was valid.”
Mary Frances Myler is a writer living in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022 with a degree in the Program of Liberal Studies.
READ MORE by Mary Frances Myler: