Some of us — and I include more PJ Media VIP commenters than I can count — weren't even half-joking when we said that if 9/11/2001 had been 9/11/2023, thousands or millions of Americans would take to the streets in support of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
Sad to say, we were right.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks that left nearly 3,000 dead and permanently altered the New York City skyline, bin Laden wrote his Letter to America, justifying his murderous act of terrorism, in part because of our "support to the oppressive Israelis in their occupation of our Palestine."
The letter for some reason (I'll get to that momentarily) resurfaced from the super-left-wing British paper, The Guardian, which for more than 20 years has hosted an English-language translation.
Thousands of young Americans took to TikTok to express how bin Laden's words have opened their eyes.
"So I just read a Letter to America," is one typical TikToker comment, "and I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same. I will never... please, read it."
HuffPo's Yashir Ali — an Iranian-American and no right-winger — had this to say:
The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they’ll never see geopolitical matters the same way again.
Many of them — and I have watched a lot — say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to a hostile power.
How bad is the situation, really? The Guardian felt it necessary to delete its "Letter to the American People" page.
Every one of the TikTok videos I've watched today on your behalf encourages viewers to go read the bin Laden letter and then hop back on TikTok to share their thoughts. That's more important than it might seem at first if you think of TikTok as a social engineering machine rather than as a social media platform.
One of TikTok's jobs is to provide sensitive data to its Communist Chinese parent company, ByteDance. That's why India banned the app completely and why the U.S. federal government and the New York state government have banned employees from having TikTok on their phones. "China’s Communist Party had 'supreme access' to all data held by TikTok’s parent company Bytedance, including on servers in the United States," according to a one-time employee in a CNN Business report from earlier this year.
Arguably worse is TikTok's algorithm. The version tailored for China's domestic audience serves up wholesome "eat your vegetables, brush your teeth, do your homework" content for young Chinese users. The American algorithm takes the fringes of society and parades them around as the new normal. All those self-loathing, America-hating, purple-haired, over-pierced weirdos whose videos I post each week on Insanity Wrap promote themselves on TikTok because TikTok promotes them.
TikTok promotes the bin Laden letter people, who will make their own bin Laden letter videos which TikTok will then also promote. Jewish Insider editor-in-chief Josh Kraushaar reminded his readers of the "scary reality" that "TikTok is the top 'news' source for 18-29-year-olds."
Thanks in part to TikTok, a segment of American youth is moving very quickly from a lame moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas to thinking bin Laden was right to murder 3,000 people on 9/11.
Ban TikTok and ban it now.
Recommended: Hamas Götterdämmerung
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