Terror warlord Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 ‘Letter to America’, in which he explains why he killed 2,977 people in the September 11 atrocities, goes viral on TikTok 21 years later

A vile letter written by the warlord behind the September 11 atrocities has gone viral on TikTok, with users saying reading it has helped them ‘understand’ why the horrific attacks were carried out in 2001.

Osama bin Laden, who founded terrorist group Al-Qaeda with the aim of waging a holy war against the Western world, wrote a ‘Letter to America’ in 2002 to vent his spleen and the motivation behind his murderous attack on mainland America, which killed thousands of people. of innocent people.

In the viral letter, Bin Laden regularly spouts anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Western views, citing one of the main reasons for September 11: American support for Israel.

At the time of writing, videos with the hashtag “LettertoAmerica” have been viewed 7.3 million times. It is extraordinary that the majority claims support for the distorted reasoning that bin Laden puts forward, without considering the freedoms he criticizes.

The letter began to gain popularity online after the British newspaper The Guardian posted a link to a 2002 article that completely translated the letter into an article about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. It was then removed without any explanation.

The link to the letter spread as hundreds of TikTokers posted videos in response to reading it, appearing to mistake the hateful rant for an intellectual think piece.

The various popular videos about the letter provide no context surrounding bin Laden’s life as a jihadist, in which his followers slaughtered thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims, or his support for some of the most oppressive political regimes imaginable.

In other parts of his correspondence, bin Laden blamed the US government for the spread of AIDS around the world, described homosexuality as “immoral” and tried to turn America into an oppressive religious state similar to Afghanistan.

The trend appears to have started with TikToker Lynette Adkins who posted a video on November 14 telling her followers to read the manifesto

At Bin Laden’s direction, nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania on 9/11

The trend appears to have started with TikToker Lynette Adkins who posted a video on November 14. “I want everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read – it’s literally two pages – and read ‘A Letter to America’.” she said.

In his infamous letter, Bin Laden raged that the treatment of the Palestinian people should be “revenged” and provided justifications for killing civilians in the name of jihad. Bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in May 2011 during an attack on his compound in Pakistan.

“The American people are the ones who pay the taxes that finance the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that attack and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies that occupy our countries in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets that maintain the blockade . of Iraq,” Bin Laden wrote.

For this reason, the Saudi Arabian terrorist wrote, all Americans and Jewish people were guilty of “the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against [Muslims].’

Bin Laden wrote that AIDS was a “satanic American invention” and frequently made anti-Semitic comments, including suggesting that American society had been infiltrated by Jewish people who “control your policies, media and economy.”

In response to the letter that went viral, Florida Senator Marco Rubio mocked TikTok users in a post on

‘Now trending on social media (especially TikTok) people are saying that after reading Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ they now understand that terrorism is a legitimate method of resistance to ‘oppression’ and that America deserved to be attacked on September 11th,” one-time presidential candidate wrote.

Bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in May 2011 during an attack on his compound in Pakistan

Hundreds of members of Generation Z posted videos seemingly mistaking the hateful rant for an intellectual think piece

How Terrorist Osama Bin Laden Was a Mass Murderer Who Masterminded 9/11 and Killed 2,977 People

Osama bin Laden was the 17th of 52 children born to an extremely wealthy family in Saudi Arabia.

He became radicalized around 1979 when he joined the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan to repel the invasion of the Soviet Union.

In 1988 he founded his terrorist network Al Qaeda or The Base. The group’s goal was to wage a holy war against the Western world.

Bin Laden focused much of his hatred on the US in the early 1990s, during the first Gulf War, when American troops were stationed close to holy sites in Saudi Arabia.

Between 1992 and 2001, bin Laden supported several attacks on the US military in Africa and the Middle East. During his period, he was expelled from his homeland and took refuge in Afghanistan.

On September 11, 2001, 19 members of al-Qaeda carried out a series of attacks in the US, with planes flying into several buildings, including the Twin Towers in New York City.

Shortly after the destruction of September 11, bin Laden was named as the main suspect by American authorities. The American army overruns Afghanistan, but he remains on the run.

Despite multiple rumors that he died in the intervening years due to a years-long battle with kidney disease, bin Laden is finally tracked down to a complex in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

On May 2, 2011, the mastermind was shot dead by US Navy SEALs on the orders of President Barack Obama. He was given a Muslim funeral and buried at sea.

The Guardian’s website, which previously hosted the full letter, now displays a message: ‘This page previously displayed a document that contained, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to the American People’ , as reported in the Observer on Sunday, November 24, 2002. The document, published here the same day, was deleted on November 15, 2023.’

A viral TikTok post about the article’s removal said it was a prime example of “narrative control.”

“Narrative control and censorship are not things you do in a society where you want to be able to think deeply about the things happening around them,” the user said.

The letter resurfaces after all these years as Israeli President Benjmain Netanyahu refutes accusations that the army has committed war crimes in Gaza, with reports that the death toll in the region has surpassed 11,000.

The region has been embroiled in conflict since Hamas brutally invaded Israel on October 7, killing around 1,400 people.

“Come back here and let me know what you think. Because I feel like I’m having an existential crisis right now, and that’s true for a lot of people. So I just need someone else to feel this too.” That video sparked more than 5,000 comments.

“Just read it… my eyes have been opened,” someone responded. “I think this has made a lot of people realize that even ‘villains’ can tell the truth,” wrote another.

‘We have been lied to all our lives, I remember seeing people cheering when Osama was found and murdered. I was a child and it confused me. It still confuses me today. The world deserves better than what this country has done to them,” said another.

Adkins followed up her original post with several others. In one of them she celebrates TikTok’s influence on American youth.

‘TikTok is going to save this generation.’ Her reasoning is that older people are “programmed to think a certain way.”

In September 2023, Adkins’ meteoric rise from lowly Amazon employee to influencer was the subject of a Los Angeles Times function.

In another, Adkins recommends that her followers watch three documentaries, including one, Out of Shadows, about which one reviewer said, “The so-called documentary is just a mask for a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories related to QAnon and its linear precursor, Pizzagate . .’

In her latest post, Adkins said that “America is losing the PR war badly” and that “they” were trying to shut down TikTok.