The newspaper The Guardian decided this Thursday to remove Osama Bin Laden's "Letter to America" from its website, after the text written by the terrorist leader began to spread and be misinterpreted on social media.
The Guardian web article containing the text from the founder of Al Qaeda was among the top search results in English on Google for the letter. It had been published since 2002.
#VIDEO | En los últimos días, se han publicado miles de videos en las redes sociales, en los que aparecen personas instando a leer la infame 'Carta a América' -escrita por Osama Bin Laden hace más de dos décadas- y justificando las atrocidades cometidas por el difunto líder… pic.twitter.com/rXOxQpqguj
— VOZ (@VozMediaUSA) November 16, 2023
Alarm bells went off when several social media users began to share the letter and misinterpret its controversial content. This all occurred amidst Israel's war against Hamas. From its beginnings, Al Qaeda was a force created to fight against the Jewish state, so the content of the letter referred not only to the United States, but also to Israel.
The content of the antisemitic letter, threatening the United States and calling for to "spill the blood" of Christians and referred to them as "targets," was interpreted by some TikTok users as a valid justification for Islamist attacks such as those of 9/11.
Speaking to Fox News, a spokesperson for The Guardian assured that "the transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead."
The importance of Palestine to Al Qaeda
Palestine was at the center of Islamist terrorists' justification for attacking the United States. According to the terrorists' argument, 9/11 was a retaliatory response to the massacre of Muslims in Palestine, at the hands of Israel and with the complicity of the United States.
"We are an international organization fighting for the liberation of Palestine and all of the Muslim countries to erect an Islamic caliphate that would rule according to the Shari'ah of Allah," says the letter from the radical Islamist leader, and which was shared by TikTok users in recent weeks due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict making global headlines.
