The White House has forcefully condemned the recent social-media trend in which young influencers have taken to endorsing Osama bin Laden’s “letter to America” justifying al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the United States.
The trend, which emerged on the Chinese short-form video app TikTok in recent days, is driven largely by anti-Israel users who have praised bin Laden’s letter for the accuracy of its antisemitic diagnosis of America’s problems.
“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 in a Thursday statement. “And no one should ever insult the 2,977 American families still mourning loved ones by associating themselves with 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 worst slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust in the name of the same conspiracy theories,” Bates continued. “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.”
Content promoting bin Laden’s letter violates TikTok’s rules on supporting terrorism, the company said on Thursday, and will be deleted from the platform.
“We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform,” the company said in a statement. “The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.”