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.
I was in downtown NYC when 9/11 happened, and I saw the second plane hit. I then went and did some military and intelligence stuff for about a decade and a half. All of that is to say I’ve been involved with 9/11 and what happened after since Day 1.
My question is this - we all knew this was OBL’s point of view. I mean, after the towers fell I was standing in a crowd outside of Penn Station on 9/11 waiting for it to reopen, and everyone was talking about how it was probably OBL. He has been on that narrative for a decade or more, had executed other attacks, and was a known major actor.
It was very widely known that what had really set him off was the alliance between the Saudi government and the US, and in particular the US military presence in SA, which he saw as a holy land now occupied by infidels.
Everyone involved in “terrorist” operations always gives lip service to the Palestinians. I’m using scare quotes there because I think we throw around the word too much and it has lost all meaning except “people fighting using unconventional means.”
All of that aside, I’m honestly curious if this is the first time what I’m assuming are younger people are finding out that people like OBL and Arafat had a point of view and were not cardboard cutout bad guys. Nobody really believed they hate us for our freedom. I mean, there is a conflict in worldviews between conservative Islam and liberal western culture, but there’s also a conflict between conservative Islam and everything that isn’t conservative Islam, and there’s a conflict between conservative Christianity and liberal western culture that also results in acts of terrorism.
There are multiple geopolitical and moral dimensions to US involvement in regions around the world including the Middle East. They’re all worthy of debate and discussion.
I just am confused that a) this is new material for anyone and b) that people are treating it like they discovered Mein Kampf or the Protocols for the first time and are taking them at face value.
In your circles perhaps but it was pretty widespread rhetoric at the time.
This was an era where idiots were trying to rename French fries “Freedom fries” and burning Dixie Chick albums because they had criticized Bush. As a non-American it was eye-opening seeing many my formerly moderate US friends become thirsty for war and hysterically denounce anyone who disagreed.
As a non-American, I always saw the “freedom fries” thing as a mockery of Americanism, I’m having a hard time believing this was a non-satirical idea.
No, the “Freedom fries” was all too real. It was actually used in cafeterias in the US Congress and the trend took off from there.
Another thing that actually did happen was a few US civilians attacked American Sikhs and even killed a few because they wore turbans.
I grew up in a red state. I recall that attempting to understand why the enemy attacked us was seen as being sympathetic to the enemy which was a traitorous position to take. Trying to explain the context of why we were attacked even in a conversation about how to most effectively defend ourselves was typically met with indignant anger. The only acceptable response to the attack was total annihilation of the enemy. I heard “glass them over” more times than I can count. The actual military response was seen as a merciful compromise where I’m from.
Wait, are you saying Bin Laden’s propaganda isn’t a good faith argument?
It’s my first time reading it. In those early days and years after the attacks, as a kid, I found it difficult to find exactly this though I was looking for it. Probably, it wouldn’t have been hard to find if I’d tried a little harder, given how old this major newspaper article is, but certainly nothing like this ever graced the airwaves or was circulated in print via Australian media in my home country. When I asked people what exactly this guy really wanted the answers were split between the ridiculously obviously bullshit line about terrorists hating freedom (which somehow also encapsulated Australian freedom but resulted in America getting attacked); and the more sympathetic view about American and western hypocrisy and bombing people. The latter might have seemed like the answer was there but it was vague, probably because people were unlikely to have read this and there were so many similar acts of violence and hypocrisy it’d be hard to say which ones specifically. That never quite explained it to me either because while less self serving and favourable, I found it unlikely that our hypocrisy in the west would annoy someone half a world away enough to carry out violence any more than our “freedom” would unless more specific “damages” had been inflicted because of that hypocrisy. The letter is enlightening because even though it’s mostly the same answer, because it’s more concrete in its specific grievances. At least at first blush.
That said, it does read, as you say as kind of lip service to each and every cause celebre listed as part of a general anger and to an extent it also kind of showed me that at least to a degree “democracy” and “freedom” sort of were mentioned in there as part of the rationale for jihad. This was curious because there seems to be a contempt in there for democracy as a system and its values combined with decrying how it has been undermined and corrupted by America and Americans and phrased in a way which seems unaware that the implication is that if America and the west were more true to their professed values there wouldn’t be a problem, even though he seems to an extent to actually have a problem with those values themselves.
I think people are duly interested and surprised to read this and to discover that it’s actually reasonably easy to understand and contains at times points that are understand-able in the sense that one could sympathise because while it probably was easy enough to find if really looking, this hasn’t in my experience been given much daylight. People have always spoken for Osama Bin Laden and his ilk and the vagueness has always given his motives an air of mysteriousness because they morphed in to the views of whatever puppeteer was speaking for him at any time. It made him inscrutable and for me made his actual reasons something I could assume were very complex. This sets it out mostly pretty clearly with the occasional steering in to rantings of an old angry religious guy. Our media, whilst presumably never banning or censoring this, (this is the guardian after all, it’s pretty major) tended to keep it pretty quiet despite exhaustive coverage of experts saying what they thought it was all about. It makes the popularisation of this much later feel a bit like discovering a hidden text, even if hidden in plain sight.
It’s interesting what you said about Saudi Arabia, but then if that was what really set him off enough to escalate things to this new level, why didn’t he mention it? It seems given everything else that warranted a mention this could have been framed as he saw it and continue to support his point.
Thank you for this - this was a fantastic explanation.
OBL had written and communicated frequently his opposition to what he saw as the US occupation of what he considers holy land, and it was very much a known driving factor in his actions. We knew about it since the Clinton administration.
I think it’s good and necessary to get rid of “they hate us for our freedom” as particularly stupid western propaganda. Of course they do. They see the West as a decadent cesspool that disobeys god. So does the Islamic Revolution government in Iran, so does North Korea, so does China, and so on. That’s not why you 9/11, any more than you invade Vietnam to end oppression and bring peace. And they’re definitely pissed about Israel too, but my point is that everyone up to and including (iirc) the Red Army Faction issued statements about Palestine. Palestine is a cause celebre. There’s a saying “When all was said and done, more was said than done.” That’s what we’ve been seeing since the Yom Kippur war. OBL could have gone after Israel. There could have been Al Qaeda fighters on their borders. Hell, they could have been funneling weapons in and training Palestinian fighters. It’s lip service and de rigueur.
The problem comes in when people view international relations like a Marvel movie with good guys and bad guys. Note that I am absolutely not saying everyone is the same. As a member of Team Rainbow, I’d rather live in the US than Saudi Arabia, and I’d rather live in California than Texas. The hero story - Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill - has deep roots in American exceptionalism and the beacon of democracy stuff. While not exactly false, it’s also not exactly true, and the idea was weaponized deliberately by people like Leo Strauss at Chicago to create a mythical America that people would think about using exactly the ideas you’re talking about. That’s where “they hate us for our freedoms” comes from. They don’t. They hate us because they’d rather be the ones in charge.
From a moral perspective, I consider something like 9/11 and the bombing of Hiroshima at the same level, just to be clear. That’s not a popular opinion with a lot of people.
But at the end of the day, you have to decide whether Hitler had a point, Pol Pot had a point, Idi Amin had a point, or whether, despite them having a point of view, we’d rather see an international order one way or the other.
I’ve stopped working on that kind of thing because I do believe it’s morally ambiguous at best. I do think people should be fully aware of the motivating factors of all of the actors involved - whether AQ, PLO, IRA, UK, USA, and so on. Just don’t take any of it at face value and instead think about actual, not idealized, outcomes.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fa-smiling-osama-bin-laden-interviewed-by-the-independends-v0-o67xx61vj3va1.png%3Fs%3D4899cf393fb0ee99db7f65143cee384b6a11cd4c
I don’t understand what is meant by posting this in this context.
America supported OBL when it suited them. He can’t be so easily demonised.