Osama bin Laden’s ‘letter to America’ after 9/11 promoted by TikTok influencers, goes viral

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden’s ‘letter to America’ after 9/11 promoted by TikTok influencers, goes viral

A TikTok influencer went viral this week for promoting Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”

Online personality and pro-Palestinian activist Lynette Adkins urged her over 175,000 TikTok followers on Tuesday to read the words of the terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read- It’s literally two pages. Go read ‘A Letter to America,” Adkins said the video. “And please come back here and just let me know what you think because I feel like I’m going through, like, an existential crisis right now and a lot of people are, so I just need someone else to be feeling this.”

Her video received roughly 800,000 views and over 80,000 likes on TikTok.

In the letter to the American people translated in English, bin Laden justifies al-Qaeda’s attacks against the U.S. because “you attacked us” and “You attacked us in Palestine.”

“Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation,” bin Laden alleged.

He continued, “The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.”

Bin Laden wrote that it brought him “both laughter and tears” when the U.S. repeated the “fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine” and rejected the notion that believing otherwise is antisemitic.

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“The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone,” the terrorist leader warned, later writing “These tragedies and calamities are only a few examples of your oppression and aggression against us. It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge. Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?!!”

He later pushes the antisemitic trope claiming the Jews “control your policies, media and economy.”

Another TikTok user raeyreads posted the entire letter on her page which received over 640,000 views despite having only 1,300 followers.

“We’ve been lied to our entire lives,” raeyreads wrote Monday. “I remember watching people cheer when Osama was found and killed. I was a child, and it confused me. It still confuses me today. The world deserves better than what this country has done to them. Change must be made.”

The Guardian, which had bin Laden’s “Letter to America” published on its website since 2002 and was the first Google search result when searching for the document, quickly removed the letter amid the sudden traffic on social media.

A spokesperson for The Guardian said , “The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been 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.”

In a separate video, Adkins praised TikTok as a platform for reliable information consumption.

“TikTok is going to save this generation,” Adkins said. “The amount of things that we’ve learned on this app in this past month alone that other people in other generations I tried to talk to them about it, they don’t understand. They don’t get it because they’ve been literally so programmed to think a certain way TikTok is undoing all of that. It’s crazy to watch in real time.”

“If you haven’t already, go read ‘A Letter to America,’” she added.