I just found out that Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” has been doing its rounds on TikTok but I haven’t seen anything about it been posted here on Lemmy about it. Perhaps people already know about it, I’m not sure. This is a link to the wayback machine. The original in the guardian has just been deleted after being online for 20 years.
Such a weird justification for taking it down, saying it was being shared without context when you can just edit your own article and add whatever context you think is necessary
Yeah I was surprised they took it down. I think it’s a foolish knee jerk reaction and is patronising towards readers.
Ironically there is know nothing to put the current spike of interest in context as you can’t read the letter on the guardian website.
I’m actually really unimpressed with the guardians action - they don’t respect their readers and clearly no longer believe in freedom of speech. They could have modified the article to put the letter in context themselves rather than link to a 20 year old article criticising it. It also makes it hard for those who want to push back against the letter and answer those who are pushing it.
Its quite feasible they had a call from the intelligence services.
There is precedent, from the Cambridge Six affair that they have been compliant.
What is the cambridge 6 affair
Cambridge five in fact - the “6”was a rumour
Manufacturing consent go brr
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As far as I’m concerned that letter should already be taught to students when they learn about 911, which didn’t happen due to some amorphous hatred of American ‘freedom,’ it happened due to Blow Back from decades of American intervention in the Middle East. The fact that they are worried about Gen Z reading it without context on tiktok is truly indicative of how wholy lacking American Education is in teaching history.
Also to show that the freedoms they were against are the same freedoms the religious radicals on US soil that have overtaken the GOP are against.
Well it was partly that. He also goes on to talk about how the US should be Islamic too, which isn’t a good look.
But yea, it really isn’t hating the US for being the US.
The sad part is he makes a lot of good observations and poignant criticisms, but just has to throw religion in there and some anti-Semitism.
He just says “Also check out our final part of the Abrahamic trilogy it’s pretty rad, maybe it can help Americans to stop being evil”.
Not sure why people are interpreting this as if he wants to force all Americans to convert.
Bin Laden was a Saudi that went to Afghanistan because the Islamic community called for help to defend against the Russians. If not for his religion he’d just be chilling in Saudi with oil money instead of risking his life defending oppressed minorities against genocide.
He kinda keeps bringing up Islam and how the Americans and Jews are against them. So yea kinda think Islam played a big part in his thought process. Or at least his version of Islam.
Him saying the Americans and Jews are against them might be related to, you know, the fact that the Americans and the Zionists were (and are) actively stealing their land and resources.
The only thing that is incorrect is him using Jews instead of Zionists, however since Zionists actively refer to themselves as Jews this is an understandable mistake (but not one we should continue to make) .
Ok I think you may be thinking that I’m blaming Islam on this. I’m not. I’m an ex-muslim myself, so I know the religion and nothing in the Quran tells Muslims to hate Jews or whatever, the opposite actually. He’s using religion as an excuse despite it saying otherwise, which makes others who don’t know about religion blame the religion or culture for his actions.
Also I know the issue is Zionists and Zionists have done a great job conflating Zionism and Judaism. But the letter says both Jews and Zionists in different places, because bin laden was conflating them himself. Not right, but still that does show some antisemitism there that he continuously conflates the two, leading him to blame Jews sometimes rather than clearly being against Zionism.
Did you not read the entire second half of the letter?
The thing briefly mentions US foreign policy in the opening, but then goes on to be all about how Islam is the only way and everyone needs to convert to it or the bombings and terror will continue.
And in that section, as examples of the US’s moral failings in the eyes of Islam he cites things like homosexuality as what needs to stop.
So yes, he did hate the US for its freedoms, and at the core of the issue was not simply blowback but religious zealotry.
The US has meddled worldwide. You don’t see South Americans whose democratic governments were overthrown by tyrants who tortured their family members with US support suddenly bombing civilians in the US.
The key difference between the many places the US has pulled some major BS and Al Queda is that only the latter was fueled by religious orthodoxy committed to worldwide forced conversion which then used US foreign policy as rationalization for killing civilians to demand that conversion.
As terrible as terrorist organizations are to the West, they perform exponentially more terror in their own regions in the service of religious conservatism at the end of a sword (literally).
9/11 was connected to blow back for US policy, but it happened because of people who think a religion by a 54 year old who married a six year old should be followed by the entire world and anyone who refuses must die terribly as a caution to the next person given a choice between conversion or terror.
It’s quite evident already from the Quran quotes he chose at the very beginning
Did you not read my second comment under this one? Also gay marriage was made completely legal in the US till 2015 via Obergefell v. Hodges
His problem wasn’t regarding the freedom to marry.
It was the freedom to have sex with people of the same gender without being stoned to death.
I mean, can we also teach how the religious references infer that any conflict leads to war as well or how opinion of what is owed them or what rights their religion “grants” them to punish non-believers results in war? Essentially creating a system of “what we say goes otherwise we will go to war with you.”
The Fox News boomers have likely never even seen this letter. Gen Z is far more politically educated than any generation of Americans before them. They’re wiser than the avarage boomer already.
Not having lead poisoning helps.
Without knowing anything of whatever is going viral, I have definitely seen some pretty shallow takes on how dumb Gen-Z must be to start reading bin Laden.
Of course such takes completely fail to address at all the content of the letter and why in the world it would have some resonance right now.
Which, for anyone remotely familiar with the letter, paints them as pretty uninformed and probably “old and backwards” in the eyes of younger people looking back on the 9/11 era with the current Gaza situation and the US’s super-boomer president’s position in mind. And, moreover, finding volumes of relevance in just how old the letter is (relative to them) and how apparently “dangerous” it is to read, to the point of censorship, for something that can read as surprisingly cogent and applicable right now.
If it is actually going viral amongst Gen-z, this could be millennials’ “ok boomer” moment, where the 9/11 experience has passed into history and our forever enemy bin Laden, who millennials can’t fathom as anything other than a monster, might make more sense for some on current politics than some of us do.
You’re never dumb for reading anything. You’re dumb for agreeing with dumb.
I’m glad projects like the Internet archive exist, and they can’t just chuck the letter into the memory hole.
But in the West we have freedom of speech and no censorship, haven’t we?
To be fair the definition of censorship does not include a newspaper removing some article from their archives on their own accord.
It’s a sign of something much worse, chilling effect, self censorship
It’s pretty bad that newspapers can alter or delete articles from 2 decades ago, without any laws or regulations around revision history etc, though. Altering history because it becomes unappealing to the present is extremely dangerous. That opens the historic record up to complete revision and why internet archives should be viewed and funded like libraries and other historic archives. No present or future entity (public or private) should be able to change history as they see fit.
A legal technicality in no way invalidates the critical role that the media is assumed to play in informing the public in a democracy.
on their own accord
very charitable
Yes if the government doesn’t make a law forcing someone to take something down it can’t be censorship, you are very smart.
Sure. Why not?
Yeah I can see why they removed it, they made it clear in no uncertain terms that the only reason they attacked America was out of self defence, which isn’t exactly a good look for the west when they’re actively funding an outright genocide against Muslim-majority civilians. Makes it really hard to manufacture consent for war against a people who openly state they’re willing to turn the same kind of war crimes back on them.
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