Holocaust started with words: TikTok Osama bin Laden madness a reminder

Users have been posting videos to the Chinese-owned app, urging their followers to read bin Laden’s 2002 'letter to America', while suggesting he was on to something.

If you really want a feel for just how bad things have become, Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America which amounted to a declaration of war against the United States, is now being endorsed by millennials in the US.

No need to pinch yourself. You read it right. The musings of the architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, Washington DC and on United Airline Flight 93 which crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, are now being revisited by youthful Americans with a large number saying they are reevaluating their thoughts on what constitutes terrorism.

On short videos, these idiots have pondered in the “just asking questions” way that maybe, just maybe, Osama bin Laden was right.

This week, thousands and thousands of videos were published on TikTok featuring responses from fresh-faced social influencers urging people to read bin Laden’s rant where he sought to justify the murderous attacks on the US. TikTok has responded by withdrawing links to the Letter to America hashtag but the posts remain there for all to see.

Obviously, these short video proclamations are driven by the Israel-Hamas conflict where the US is portrayed as evil and Israel a puppet state.

“This has really made me think” is the most common refrain from young TikTok-ers, many who sport more facial piercings than seems wise. Bin Laden was an unrestrained homophobe and his vile unrainbow-like allusions to homosexuality in his Letter to America have been left to go through to the keeper. Nothing to see there, apparently. The vicious anti-Semitic tropes, too, have been casually ignored.

The collapse of the Twin Towers killed some 2800 people. Picture: Getty Images

Millennials aren’t strong on history otherwise they might wish to spend time reflecting on how Hitler’s rise to power on the back of anti-Semitic rhetoric led to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws which, in turn, led to the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.

Step by step. The collective consciousness changed by increment to where the enforced segregation of German Jews became the accepted norm. And from there it was another short step to January 1942 and the Wannsee Conference where SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich and Munitions Minister Albert Speer addressed Nazi bureaucrats and administrators at the Wannsee Conference to implement the Final Solution.

Unfortunately, proper historical study requires a greater attention span than the average TikTok “look at me” narcissism where videos run, on average, 50 seconds.

It’s also worth remembering the German people lived under one of the most brutal police states in history while American TikTok-ers have no such constraint.

The all too common refrain on these videos is that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.

Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous "Letter to America," in which he explained why he attacked the United States.

The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and… pic.twitter.com/EwjiGtFEE3

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 16, 2023

American journalist, Yashar Ali tweeted his concerns yesterday. Ali is a contributor to the Huffington Post and has reported for the New York Times. His deep dive into the TikTok madness yesterday left him disillusioned. The easy way commenters dismissed his long tweet is worth your time, too, even if you’re not a X, formerly known as Twitter user

Anti-semitism has always been the cornerstone of extreme ideologies to the left and right. Scrape away at Corbynite or other forms of European socialism and there it is. While the hard right don’t don the brown shirts anymore and tend to avoid discussions on what they refer to as ‘the JQ’ (the Jewish Question) until new members are firmly inculcated with their twisted ideology.

The fringes, the so-called freedom movement is replete with conspiracy theory delusional brain-addled thinking that forms another basis of anti-Semitism which runs along the lines that a cabal of Jewish bankers run the world.

But what is concerning is that the progressive Left or great chunks of it are now openly embracing anti-Semitism through a prism of faux or assumed victimhood. The idea of wiping a nation off the map remains ethereal to their tender sensitivities. They are unable to make the link as anyone who has studied history does, that the Holocaust didn’t just happen as some blip of history. It started with words.

In Israel and in the US, not to mention Australia, Jews are free to express themselves politically. There is a wide spectrum of political thought, all the way from auto anti-Semitism to the more extreme expressions of Zionism. But Jews, if I might generalise, are for the most part socially progressive.

God only knows what Jewish progressives make of the TikTok nonsense and the broader expressions of anti-Semitism taking place on the streets in the world’s cities, other than to say that once this conflict is over, things can never go back to where they had been.

One can’t sit around the dinner table in earnest, civil political discussion with someone who wants you wiped out at an existential, river-to-the-sea level.