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.
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.
I was in downtown NYC when 9/11 happened, and I saw the second plane hit. I then went and did some military and intelligence stuff for about a decade and a half. All of that is to say I’ve been involved with 9/11 and what happened after since Day 1.
My question is this - we all knew this was OBL’s point of view. I mean, after the towers fell I was standing in a crowd outside of Penn Station on 9/11 waiting for it to reopen, and everyone was talking about how it was probably OBL. He has been on that narrative for a decade or more, had executed other attacks, and was a known major actor.
It was very widely known that what had really set him off was the alliance between the Saudi government and the US, and in particular the US military presence in SA, which he saw as a holy land now occupied by infidels.
Everyone involved in “terrorist” operations always gives lip service to the Palestinians. I’m using scare quotes there because I think we throw around the word too much and it has lost all meaning except “people fighting using unconventional means.”
All of that aside, I’m honestly curious if this is the first time what I’m assuming are younger people are finding out that people like OBL and Arafat had a point of view and were not cardboard cutout bad guys. Nobody really believed they hate us for our freedom. I mean, there is a conflict in worldviews between conservative Islam and liberal western culture, but there’s also a conflict between conservative Islam and everything that isn’t conservative Islam, and there’s a conflict between conservative Christianity and liberal western culture that also results in acts of terrorism.
There are multiple geopolitical and moral dimensions to US involvement in regions around the world including the Middle East. They’re all worthy of debate and discussion.
I just am confused that a) this is new material for anyone and b) that people are treating it like they discovered Mein Kampf or the Protocols for the first time and are taking them at face value.
It’s my first time reading it. In those early days and years after the attacks, as a kid, I found it difficult to find exactly this though I was looking for it. Probably, it wouldn’t have been hard to find if I’d tried a little harder, given how old this major newspaper article is, but certainly nothing like this ever graced the airwaves or was circulated in print via Australian media in my home country. When I asked people what exactly this guy really wanted the answers were split between the ridiculously obviously bullshit line about terrorists hating freedom (which somehow also encapsulated Australian freedom but resulted in America getting attacked); and the more sympathetic view about American and western hypocrisy and bombing people. The latter might have seemed like the answer was there but it was vague, probably because people were unlikely to have read this and there were so many similar acts of violence and hypocrisy it’d be hard to say which ones specifically. That never quite explained it to me either because while less self serving and favourable, I found it unlikely that our hypocrisy in the west would annoy someone half a world away enough to carry out violence any more than our “freedom” would unless more specific “damages” had been inflicted because of that hypocrisy. The letter is enlightening because even though it’s mostly the same answer, because it’s more concrete in its specific grievances. At least at first blush.
That said, it does read, as you say as kind of lip service to each and every cause celebre listed as part of a general anger and to an extent it also kind of showed me that at least to a degree “democracy” and “freedom” sort of were mentioned in there as part of the rationale for jihad. This was curious because there seems to be a contempt in there for democracy as a system and its values combined with decrying how it has been undermined and corrupted by America and Americans and phrased in a way which seems unaware that the implication is that if America and the west were more true to their professed values there wouldn’t be a problem, even though he seems to an extent to actually have a problem with those values themselves.
I think people are duly interested and surprised to read this and to discover that it’s actually reasonably easy to understand and contains at times points that are understand-able in the sense that one could sympathise because while it probably was easy enough to find if really looking, this hasn’t in my experience been given much daylight. People have always spoken for Osama Bin Laden and his ilk and the vagueness has always given his motives an air of mysteriousness because they morphed in to the views of whatever puppeteer was speaking for him at any time. It made him inscrutable and for me made his actual reasons something I could assume were very complex. This sets it out mostly pretty clearly with the occasional steering in to rantings of an old angry religious guy. Our media, whilst presumably never banning or censoring this, (this is the guardian after all, it’s pretty major) tended to keep it pretty quiet despite exhaustive coverage of experts saying what they thought it was all about. It makes the popularisation of this much later feel a bit like discovering a hidden text, even if hidden in plain sight.
It’s interesting what you said about Saudi Arabia, but then if that was what really set him off enough to escalate things to this new level, why didn’t he mention it? It seems given everything else that warranted a mention this could have been framed as he saw it and continue to support his point.
I don’t understand what is meant by posting this in this context.
America supported OBL when it suited them. He can’t be so easily demonised.
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.
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.
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.
Bush was Palpatine
Osama was Obi-wan
Right?
Both bad. For different reasons.
As usual, both, like most US Presidents are war criminals if we go by the International Definition. If you can see it objectively, which many Americans may have trouble doing so.
Bush’s actions ended up killing 4+ million in the Middle East, along with the creation of ISIS. Extra ironic points since the USA gave billions to the Mujahideen, back in the day, funding a young Osama Bin Ladden, so they could wage a civil war against the Afghanistani goverment during their civil war. Because the goverment was leaning communist at the time. Seen those photos where Afghanistani women wore western clothing in the late 70’s? The USA helped get rid of that by giving money to the religious zealots.
Obama murdered the most people via drone attacks in history. Mostly on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the time. Including whole families and children. Also, he pardon/freed Bushed from liability the moment he took office. If I recall.
There are other sites that break down the fatalities of the later. Since most people ate at least aware of most of the fuck ups of the former.
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
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.
