TikTokers Discover Osama bin Laden’s Letter Justifying 9/11, Decide They Agree With bin Laden

Thousands of TikTok users are discovering Osama bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America” for the first time — and concluding that the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that killed some 3,000 people had some good points.

A slew of users on the Chinese-owned social media platform expressed shock in their videos that they did not completely disagree with bin Laden’s justification for hijacking commercial planes and crashing them into office buildings.

Bin Laden claimed 9/11 was retribution for the United States’ Cold War-era meddling in the Middle East and support for Israel, which he believed was guilty of occupying Palestinian land and oppressing the Palestinian people for decades.

Several other TikTok videos plainly explain the contents of the letter, comment on the discussion about the letter or explain the context of Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks to an audience that may not have been alive when they happened.

Most of the videos tagged with "Letter to America" fall short of viral status, with the top performers getting tens or hundreds of thousands of views — not the millions or tens of millions of views that truly popular TikTok videos drive.

Videos using the hashtag #LetterToAmerica have a combined view count of 3.9 million views, a relatively small amount by TikTok's standards. In comparison, videos about Israel's raid early Wednesday on a Gaza hospital with the hashtag #alshifa have more than 26 million views.

Still, interest in the letter spiked so much that it prompted The Guardian, which had published the letter back when Bin Laden originally did so in November 2002, to remove it from its website on Wednesday.

Bin Laden was killed in a U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011 — nearly 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Journalists pointed out that thousands of people have posted such videos across TikTok and other social media platforms.

The backlash to the trend on X, formerly Twitter, has been enormous.

“'I find bin laden’s writing surprisingly convincing' is literally no worse than 'Hitler made some good points,'" wrote the commentator Ben Dreyfuss.

"In fact, it’s probably worse since it’s more recent."

The founder of Bellingcat wrote: "Big 'you gotta hand it to Bin Laden' energy" in some of the videos.

However, some have criticized the Guardian for taking down the original "Letter to America." Frederick Joseph, the author of two New York Times-bestselling books about social justice and racism, said the Guardian's decision was a "good example of narrative control."

“It started going viral, not because people were necessarily agreeing with Osama Bin Laden’s actions or his moral clarity, but rather because the letter offered perspective into the hypocrisy of America, the hypocrisy of settler colonial nations, so on and so forth, and discussing the atrocities people in the Middle East have faced," Joseph said.