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The White House has denounced those sharing Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” as an “insult” to the “innocent” victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks — as TikTok vowed to erase all mentions of the madman’s propaganda.
“There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history — highlighting them as his direct motivation for murdering 2,977 innocent Americans,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.
“No one should ever insult the 2,977 American families still mourning loved ones by associating themselves with the vile words of Osama bin Laden, particularly now, at a time of rising antisemitic violence in the world, and just after Hamas terrorists carried out the world slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust in the name of the same conspiracy theories,” he said.
“Like President Biden said this year in remembrance of the Americans who lost their lives because of Osama bin Laden, ‘it’s more important now than ever that we come together’ against a rising tide of hatred and extremism.”
The since-eliminated terror leader’s 2002 letter recently went viral after delusional TikTok influencers cited it for changing their world views in light of the atrocities of Hamas terrorists and Israel’s counterattacks.
In it, bin Laden claimed that he orchestrated the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center because the US “attacked us in Palestine.”
Bin Laden called the creation of Israel a “crime which must be erased.”
He also claimed that the AIDS epidemic was “a Satanic American Invention” and objected to US companies allowing women to have jobs, fuming, “You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins.”
The antisemitic tirade went on to assert that in the US, Jews “control your policies, media and economy.”
The Guardian, which had published the full text of the letter in 2002, pulled it down on Wednesday, citing the fact in a statement that it was being “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.”
A TikTok spokesperson also said that “content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism” and added that the company was “proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”
At the same time, the company bizarrely tried to deny that the bin Laden-related content had gone viral — despite videos that racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
“The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate,” the spokesperson added.
“This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
The trend seems to have been jumpstarted by Lynette Adkins — a social media influencer with 12 million followers who has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times.
In her video, which has received nearly 100,000 likes and more than 5,500 comments since it was posted Wednesday, Adkins told her followers to “stop what they’re doing right now and go read a letter to America.”
Adkins followed up with several other posts, including one in which she discussed “three movies to watch after you’ve read ‘a letter to America’” and another in which she reacted to the Guardian taking down the text and declared “America is losing the PR war bad.”
“The Guardian taking that post down is actually one of the worst things that they could’ve done. I don’t know who was behind it or what the reasoning was, but I feel like it literally just confirmed everything that we read in the letter,” Adkins said.
Another TikTok user said she would “never look at life the same, I will never look at this country the same.
“Please read it and if you have read it, let me know if you are also going through an existential crisis in this very moment, because in the last 20 minutes, the entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed and I have lived has changed.”
And a third social media user whose video went viral said that after reading the letter, “it becomes apparent to me that the actions of 9/11 and those acts committed against the US and its people were all just the buildup of our government failing other nations.”
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