You can’t make this stuff up.
Massive TikTok influencers are racking up millions of views on videos openly pra🥃ising the writings of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, calling theꦫm “mind-blowing” and “eye-opening.”𒅌
“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,’” Lynette Adkins said in one viral TikTok. “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.”
If all these TikTokkers were doing was encouraging people to skeptically read bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America,” which explained his supposed justifications for the 9/11 attacks, that wouldn’t be so objectionab♔le.
Americans should
But they should read it critically and see it for the (deeply 🃏antisemitic 🍒and conspiratorial) morally bankrupt apologia for barbarism it is.
Instead, several TikTokkers in the♌se vira♔l videos promoting the letter openly state they now realize bin Laden “was right.”
It’s bizarඣre, if unsurprising, to see this stance from supposedly “woke” progressives because 𝔍they must have breezed past the part of the letter where bin Laden names our country’s tolerance of homosexuality, separation of church and state and sexual liberation for women as motivating reasons for terrorists’ desire to destroy America.
But the 𝄹bulk of the letter cites US Middle E🐻ast policy as justification for the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 civilians.
While many of the specific charges bin Laden levies at America are disputed or ahistorical, it is absolutely true the motivations behind anti-American terrorism are more complicated than “They hate us becau♚se we’re free,” and the concept of “blowback” from our actions overseas is real — ܫit was first recognized by the CIA.
Yet what’s not true — and is, in 𝓰fact, evil to its core — is bin Laden’s logical leap that if the US government has harmed Muslims overseas, they are therefore justified in targeting and killing innocent American civilians.
“The American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us,” bin Laden writes, because the “American people are the ones who choose their government” and “the American people ar꧃e the ones who pay th🐓e taxes which fund the planes that bomb us.”
Bin Laden uses depraved mental gymnastics to justify murdering women, children and others with no connection to US🍰 foreign policy in cold blood on 9/11.
But despite these arguments’ obvious hollowness, millions of impressionable, clueless young people apparently find them so convin🥃cing as to reorient their worldview.
This has ramifications far beyond how 🌜the next generation ref🍰lects on 9/11.
Since Hamas’ vile Oct. 7 terrorist attacks that killed at least 1,200 Israelis, many Americans have been dismayed that many young people are openly siding with Hamas and viewing the terrorists who killed civili🤡ans as “freedom fighters.”
Indeed, a depressing but sadly unsurprising Harvard-Harris poll found that 51% of 18- to 24-year-olds think Hamas’ violence aℱgainst Israeli civilians was justified.
How did we get here?
Well, even if they hadn’t read bin Laden’s infamous letter, young people have already been spoon-fed a form of the intellectually bankrupt collectivist worldview he espouses through the leftist messaging that dominates college campuses, digital-media and 💧social-media discourse.
Holding an Ame🅷rican janitor who worked in the Twin Towers or an Israeli baby slaughtered by Hamas responsible for the actions of their government is not all that different from the kind of collective or ancestral guilt regularly assigned to white people in the “woke” worldview.
It’s all part and parcel of an un-American ideolo𒁃gy that views people not as indi👍viduals responsible for their own deeds and actions but as tokens from a nebulous collective.
It’s not enough just to𒁃 condemn or write off the millions of 🏅young people who’ve fallen prey to this pernicious perspective.
Instead, we mu🐟st reach out🌳 to youth and try, somehow, to help them see the error of their ways.
Because if we fa🅰il, the America our descendants inherit wi🥃ll be fundamentally unrecognizable from the one we all know and love.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist, and co-founder of .
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