On the latest edition of The Editors podcast, Charlie Cooke addressed the pro-bin Laden trend on TikTok after users discovered the late terrorist leader’s “Letter to America.”
“I suppose the only good thing that has happened here,” Cooke remarked mordantly, “is for once the people of TikTok have stopped claiming that George W. Bush carried out 9/11 and have now acknowledged that it was Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, they have appended the word ‘good’ to that analysis.
“And these people are stupid,” he continued. “We can talk around this if we want to, but these people are stupid. They don’t know anything.”
He said that if a conservative opposes gay marriage, he becomes a non-person. “But when Osama bin Laden says that homosexuality must be banned in the new caliphate,” he noted, “they skip over it. There’s so much in that bin Laden letter that should have been appalling to the TikTok brigade, but they seem to ignore it.”
He explained that “in a superficial sense [I] see why people who are used to the language of decolonization and ethnic studies and oppression would have found a lot to like. It is not usually the case when one hears from academics that one is subjected to as much antisemitism as is in that letter, although it can be implied. But the rest of what bin Laden said about the world situation really could have been taken from a course at Oberlin.
“If you are primed to see the world in those terms,” he continued, “if you are primed to believe that America is evil, that everything it does domestically and abroad is bad, that the rest of the globe is suffering because of America, that American politics won’t change on this front because of money, donors, capitalism, then maybe you like that letter.”
Still, he added, “the historical context should have outweighed any of those instincts, and it didn’t. This was not something that happened 700 years ago. You’re not asking people to evaluate power struggles in 13th-century Scotland. This happened 22 years ago. It’s one of the most traumatic things that ever happened to the United States. The guy in question, Osama bin Laden, was clearly, openly, proudly responsible for it.
“How do you get to a point,” he asked, “at which you read a letter from Osama bin Laden and say, ‘Wow, I guess I’ve had the wool pulled over my eyes. He had a point.’ What do you lack in general education, general understanding of the world, general context?”
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