I just found out that Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” has been doing its rounds on TikTok but I haven’t seen anything about it been posted here on Lemmy about it. Perhaps people already know about it, I’m not sure. This is a link to the wayback machine. The original in the guardian has just been deleted after being online for 20 years.
Well it was partly that. He also goes on to talk about how the US should be Islamic too, which isn’t a good look.
But yea, it really isn’t hating the US for being the US.
The sad part is he makes a lot of good observations and poignant criticisms, but just has to throw religion in there and some anti-Semitism.
He just says “Also check out our final part of the Abrahamic trilogy it’s pretty rad, maybe it can help Americans to stop being evil”.
Not sure why people are interpreting this as if he wants to force all Americans to convert.
Bin Laden was a Saudi that went to Afghanistan because the Islamic community called for help to defend against the Russians. If not for his religion he’d just be chilling in Saudi with oil money instead of risking his life defending oppressed minorities against genocide.
He kinda keeps bringing up Islam and how the Americans and Jews are against them. So yea kinda think Islam played a big part in his thought process. Or at least his version of Islam.
Him saying the Americans and Jews are against them might be related to, you know, the fact that the Americans and the Zionists were (and are) actively stealing their land and resources.
The only thing that is incorrect is him using Jews instead of Zionists, however since Zionists actively refer to themselves as Jews this is an understandable mistake (but not one we should continue to make) .
Ok I think you may be thinking that I’m blaming Islam on this. I’m not. I’m an ex-muslim myself, so I know the religion and nothing in the Quran tells Muslims to hate Jews or whatever, the opposite actually. He’s using religion as an excuse despite it saying otherwise, which makes others who don’t know about religion blame the religion or culture for his actions.
Also I know the issue is Zionists and Zionists have done a great job conflating Zionism and Judaism. But the letter says both Jews and Zionists in different places, because bin laden was conflating them himself. Not right, but still that does show some antisemitism there that he continuously conflates the two, leading him to blame Jews sometimes rather than clearly being against Zionism.