A deranged manifesto written by the mastermind of the September 11 atrocities has gone viral on TikTok, with many users expressing their understanding as to why the horrific attacks were carried out 22 years ago.
In the letter, Osama bin Laden regularly spouts anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Western views, citing the main reason for September 11 as US support for Israel.
At the time of writing, videos with the hashtag “LettertoAmerica” have been viewed 7.3 million times. Bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in May 2011 during an attack on his compound in Pakistan.
In other parts of his correspondence, bin Laden blamed the US government for the spread of AIDS around the world, described homosexuality as “immoral” and tried to turn America into an oppressive religious state similar to Afghanistan.
From there, the link to the letter spread like wildfire, with hundreds of members of Generation Z posting videos seemingly mistaking the hateful rant for an intellectual think piece.
In the ‘Letter to America’, Osama bin Laden accused the US of being complicit in the ‘oppression’ of the Palestinians and of spreading AIDS around the world
The trend appears to have started with TikToker Lynette Adkins who posted a video on November 14 telling her followers to read the manifesto
At the time of writing, videos with the hashtag “LettertoAmerica” have been viewed 7.3 million times
At Bin Laden’s direction, nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in New York City, Washington DC and Virginia on 9/11
The trend appears to have started with TikToker Lynette Adkins who posted a video on November 14. “I want everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read – it’s literally two pages – and read ‘A Letter to America’.” she said.
“Come back here and let me know what you think. Because I feel like I’m having an existential crisis right now, and that’s true for a lot of people. So I just need someone else to feel this too.” That video sparked more than 5,000 comments.
“Just read it… my eyes have been opened,” someone responded. “I think this has made a lot of people realize that even ‘villains’ can tell the truth,” wrote another.
‘We have been lied to all our lives, I remember seeing people cheering when Osama was found and murdered. 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,” said another.
Adkins followed up her original post with several others. In one of them she celebrates TikTok’s influence on American youth.
‘TikTok is going to save this generation.’ Her reasoning is that older people are “programmed to think a certain way.”
In September 2023, Adkins’ meteoric rise from lowly Amazon employee to influencer was the subject of a Los Angeles Times function.
In another, Adkins recommends that her followers watch three documentaries, including one, Out of Shadows, about which one reviewer said, “The so-called documentary is just a mask for a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories related to QAnon and its linear precursor, Pizzagate . .’
In her latest post, Adkins said that “America is losing the PR war badly” and that “they” were trying to shut down TikTok.
Bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in May 2011 during an attack on his compound in Pakistan
Hundreds of members of Generation Z posted videos seemingly mistaking the hateful rant for an intellectual think piece
In his infamous letter, Bin Laden raged that the treatment of the Palestinian people should be “revenged” and provided justifications for killing civilians in the name of jihad.
“The American people are the ones who pay the taxes that finance the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that attack and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies that occupy our countries in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets that maintain the blockade . of Iraq,” Bin Laden wrote.
For this reason, the Saudi Arabian terrorist wrote, all Americans and Jewish people were guilty of “the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against (Muslims).”
Bin Laden wrote that AIDS was a “satanic American invention” and frequently made anti-Semitic comments, including suggesting that American society had been infiltrated by Jewish people who “control your policies, media and economy.”
In response to the letter that went viral, Florida Senator Marco Rubio mocked TikTok users in a post on
‘Now trending on social media (especially TikTok) people say that after reading Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ they now understand that terrorism is a legitimate method of resistance to ‘oppression’ and that America deserved to be attacked on September 11th,” one-time presidential candidate wrote.
The Guardian’s website, which previously hosted the full letter, now displays a message: ‘This page previously displayed a document that contained, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to the American People’ , as reported in the Observer on Sunday, November 24, 2002. The document, published here the same day, was deleted on November 15, 2023.’
A viral TikTok post about the article’s removal said it was a prime example of “narrative control.”
“Narrative control and censorship are not things you do in a society where you want to be able to think deeply about the things happening around them,” the user said.
The letter resurfaces after all these years as Israeli President Benjmain Netanyahu refutes accusations that the army has committed war crimes in Gaza, with reports that the death toll in the region has surpassed 11,000.
The region has been embroiled in conflict since Hamas brutally invaded Israel on October 7, killing around 1,400 people.