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The original was posted on /r/worldnews by /u/LuvIsOurResistance on 2023-11-16 10:29:23.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“We’ve been lied to our entire lives, I remember watching people cheer when Osama was found and killed,” wrote a 25-year-old user who posted the letter in full.
Writing a year after 9/11, bin Laden noted in his message that he was seeking to answer two questions that had occupied American media since that terrible day: “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” and “What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?” The first section is surely the most relevant to the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as it denounces the U.S. for helping to establish and maintain a Jewish state in the Palestinian territories.
Bin Laden expounded further about how the oppression of Palestine had to be “revenged,” going on to impugn Western imperialism and hegemony in broader terms, before shifting into a justification for killing civilians in his jihad.
“The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq,” he wrote.
While some of bin Laden’s judgments would not have been out of place in mainstream American politics of the era — he takes the U.S. to task for not signing the Kyoto Protocol treaty on restricting emission of greenhouse gases, for example — the letter is also interspersed with antisemitic tropes and hate speech.
He repeatedly wrote that the country was dominated by Jews who “control your policies, media and economy,” elsewhere condemning homosexuality and fornication as “immoral,” and accusing the U.S. of spreading AIDS, which he termed a “Satanic American Invention.” As for what al-Qaeda wanted, bin Laden said that the U.S. had to renounce its culture of “hypocrisy” and become an Islamic nation.
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TheFriar@lemm.ee 2 years ago
….okay. I—
For fucks sake. What have we done to people that they can’t have nuanced opinions anymore? Suddenly, “bin Laden was right because he agrees with me on this issue!” You’ve been ‘lied to your whole life?’ How fucking stupid do you have to be? Like…you know he isn’t hated for…his feelings on Palestine, right?
“I love dogs just SO SO MUCH and I don’t care who knows it!” If I go on to use that rationale to kill thousands…would people be on my side because dogs are awesome? It’s not the justification that’s the issue. I mean, shit, I was a kid, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the patriot act and bush in general radicalized me very young. And 9/11 happened, and even then, at the height of 200 fever, I could separate out my feelings for his rationale and my feeling about how awful it was to see so many people die like that. I had nuanced feelings about the situation, because I was saying the same things, I knew that what the US was doing in the Middle East (and had been doing longer than I’d been alive) had been disgusting and wrong.
…but I still wasn’t pro 9/11? They showed bin Laden’s reasoning for a long time on the news. It wasn’t a secret. You were never lied to. You just can’t differentiate between a hot button issue and literally anything else if someone agrees with you. Which is why people are supporting…Hamas. Hamas is a terrible far-right organization that doesn’t give a shit about the Palestinian people. But because “Israel vs Hamas” seems to be the dichotomy, people can’t understand that they’re not actually pro-Hamas.
I just feel like we’ve gotten SO GODDAMN STUPID.