He’s dead, he literally did 9/11 and he’s TikTok’s latest political icon?


Osama Bin Laden has found himself on the receiving end of a posthumous glow-up this week after his infamous Letter to America began making the rounds on TikTok, with several arguing that minus the whole terrorism thing, he was kinda cooking.


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“This letter is so well written and so reasonably structured in an agreement,” said one TikToker in a video that has since been re-uploaded to Twitter. “Everything he said was valid.”



While the letter, which largely criticized the United States’ support of Israel, initially began recirculating amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza, people on both sides of the Israel-Hamas War began condemning these teens’ hellfire hot takes.


“Osama Bin Laden was fascist, antisemitic, racist to Black people, & hated women/little girls,” wrote Twitter user @WickedNFine. “You’re saying he’s right because he criticized the west?? Hitler also criticized America. But he still was a fascist war criminal. Revisioning history is not being self-aware.”



“Y’all would find yourselves sympathetic to Hitler if he’d made a correct statement about Western politics and the destructiveness of American imperialism,” added @platformedboots. “Osama Bin Laden is not someone to romanticize. You agree with some of his sentiments, fine. Let that be where it ends.”


But it wasn’t just the political enthusiasts of Twitter who spoke out about this issue. The Guardian, who initially published the letter back in 2002, decided to wipe it from their website, though a copy of the webpage and the letter itself is still available on several internet archives.


“The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context,” the British publication explained in a note shared to their website. “Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualized it.”


But regardless of whether TikTok will learn that Osama Bin Laden is literally Osama Bin Laden, one thing is certain: To paraphrase @iramadisonthree. if we’re gonna take a deep dive into the life and times of the late terrorist, we should at least focus on his Whitney Houston obsession.