What Created Bin Laden’s TikTok Fans?

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, a quote that’s commonly attributed to Aristotle. I wish people would remember it when they read the words of a terrorist who orchestrated the murder of thousands of people and somehow start to think, “Gee, maybe this guy was onto something.” Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn, and today we’ll be examining a crazy trend on TikTok involving members of Gen Z sharing Osama bin Laden’s letter to America, which he wrote a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In particular, I’m going to focus on the religious aspects of the letter and what it reveals about the culture that we live in, and that there are people who think that this letter is telling the truth and that bin Laden was right and what it reveals about Islam itself, which will be an unexpected yet suitable follow-up to my previous episode, Why I’m Not a Muslim. If you didn’t see that episode, click the link in the description below.

Before I do that though, I will say that if you want content on TikTok that does not promote terrorism, then check out the Council of Trent TikTok page. And if two minute clips of our episodes are not enough for you, please subscribe to our main channel so you don’t miss our content and so you can help the channel to grow and reach more people. All right, so a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks Osama bin Laden released a letter to Americans explaining why he felt that it was necessary to organize the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. Last week, the letter went viral online because a fair number of people had become ambivalent about the US support for Israel and their war against Hamas. So people started sharing the letter that was originally on the Guardian newspaper website until the letter was taken down, but you can still find it all over the internet.

Now, I’m not going to get into the politics of the letter, like the role of US military bases overseas. Instead, I want to examine relevant religious and cultural excerpts of the letter and how people respond to that on TikTok. I also want to propose a few reasons for why so many young people online are saying the mastermind of the worst terrorist attack in US history was right. So I want to explain how they came to that conclusion and how we can help other people not come to that conclusion and come to the truth instead. But first, here are a few examples of this worrying trend.

It is just insane because this letter is so well-written and so reasonably structured in an argument.

I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same.

Everything he said was valid.

Before you even read the letter, I did want to mention in reading the letter, I could only think of this tweet that I saw the other day. Under settler colonialism, any kind of resistance is branded as terrorists because the only acceptable violence is violence by the occupier.

And then you have this person who has texts that says, “Me when I got the news in 2011 that we got him,” which I’m assuming is talking about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Then it says, “2023, reading his, bin Laden’s letter to America knowing he was right.” Oh, good grief.

I think what suckers so many of these people into thinking bin Laden was right or justified is because evildoers are often caricatures in our culture. When you’re a child, you’re just told, “These are the bad guys. The bad guys want to hurt us because they just hate us because they’re evil and we’re the good guys, so we need to do something about it.” When you have that mentality, you end up approaching the world with an oversimplified, one-dimensional framework and that ends up getting shattered when you see the bad guys are not cartoonish villains and the good guys can have serious flaws. The bad guys may even have sympathetic reasons for why they do what they do. But if you’re not morally well-formed, what happens is your naïve one-dimensional view of the world when it encounters this complexity becomes an even more naïve, inaccurate three-dimensional view that is colored by things like woke stereotypes about America being the worst country on earth or other nonsense like that. Check out this clip.

We really need to stop paying taxes because they ain’t doing nothing but messing up everybody else and America is the bully. And it’s sad because they have brainwashed us to think that we was the best country on the planet when in reality we’re the worst country in the planet.

So America is the worst country on earth even though it’s the number one place people around the world legally and illegally try to immigrate to? All right. Now, America is not perfect. Once again, that’s a one-dimensional caricature, but it’s insane to read things in Osama bin Laden’s letter and one, take him at his word when he mentions unspecified atrocities that America allegedly committed the Middle East, and two, even if he were correct about that, it’s insane to defend his moral perspective that involves claims like whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs. Now, attacks on civilians justify a military response even if civilian deaths in the response are foreseen. The civilian deaths however cannot be intended. They cannot be the primary targets. The desire to kill civilians because an enemy killed your civilian population is not justice, it’s vengeance. On September 11th, Al-Qaeda didn’t attack a Navy ship or an Army base in their fight for freedom against colonial imperialist America.

They didn’t blow up the Twin Towers at 3:00 in the morning when barely anyone would’ve been in the buildings. They crashed planes with frightened passengers, some of them toddlers on board. They flattened office buildings full of people who had no meaningful connection to US foreign policy. That’s not freedom fighting, that’s murder. Now, look, I understand being angry at the US government. I think there’s good evidence for example, that the government through negligence or even direct action killed innocent people at the Waco siege in 1993, but that did not justify Timothy McVeigh blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma city in 1995 and killing 168 people including 15 children in the center’s daycare, some of whom were only a year old. So it’s important to see and to teach young people that the world is more complicated than just the good guys and the bad guys that you might see in media.

While every party in a war cannot be just, because if they were all just there wouldn’t be a war at all, every party in a war or a conflict can be unjust to varying degrees. However, that complexity does not justify abandoning simple and essential moral truths every human being is bound to follow, like it is always wrong to directly and intentionally kill innocent people. Therefore, it’s important to be able to explain to young people who may come across this propaganda from someone like Osama bin Laden to say, “Yes, these are the reasons terrorists give to justify the evil they do and here’s why they’re wrong,” and not just simply assert, Hey, they’re the bad guys. They hate us, we’re the good guys. Just trust me on this. It’s also why we should tell people, especially young people, these are the lies that the Nazis told to justify killing Jewish people in the holocaust and here’s why they were wrong.

Otherwise, a young person could easily be sucked into antisemitism because they may have never heard these kinds of claims or arguments about the threat Jewish people presented to society, and they may not be sure, well, is this right? Is this wrong? Because they always just thought the Nazis were just cartoonishly evil people, but they don’t recognize that even the Nazis in World War II, they were just people like you or me who could be moved by arguments and rhetoric about what constitutes a genuine threat to society. Young people need to be exposed to what the historian Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. This is the idea that many people who participated in the Holocaust, as Arendt says, were not sadistic or bloodthirsty. They were just ordinary people who conformed to social expectations from other people who claimed this final solution was necessary for the good of society. They were just going about their ordinary lives participating in an extraordinary evil.

The caricature problem also shows up in larger cultural issues when we share our faith. For example, if you give children the idea that LGBT advocates are a super evil kind of other, then those children’s one-dimensional worldview about that group of people, it’s going to collapse when they meet a pleasant or congenial gay couple. They’ll think, “Well, I guess what they’re doing couldn’t be that bad. I mean, they’re so nice.” That’s why we need to help young people question their assumption that a nice person could never habitually do something that is gravely sinful. They have to be able to see that there are people who are living out moral lives that may not be very nice, and there are people who are living very immoral lives that in many other respects are actually very nice to others.

Or if you only teach children caricatures of Protestantism or secular humanism, they won’t be prepared to address the more sophisticated defenses of those worldviews. And if you and I won’t teach young people this, other people like far left college professors, which is the case with something like secular humanism, they will. Indeed, one reason the bin Laden letter has caught on with so many young people is that many parts of the letter simply repeat the same tired anti-American, anti-western tropes that they hear among their college professors.

Charles Cook’s article, Wokesters for Osama bin Laden, published at the National Review, makes a good point about this. He writes the following, “Much of what bin Laden says in his letter is indistinguishable from the output of your average ethnic studies professor. So grotesque as it most certainly is, the fact that the sort of people who are marinated in the output of your average ethnic studies professor enjoyed reading it should probably not come as a great surprise. In his missive, bin Laden wrote, ‘Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people who hold sway in their political parties and fund their election campaigns with their gifts.’ Had he not followed it up directly with, ‘Behind them stand the Jews who control your policies, media, and economy,’ this sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear openly on TikTok in pretty much every other context. The same is true of his charge that, ‘Your forces occupy our countries. You spread your military bases throughout them, you corrupt our lands and you besiege our sanctities,’ which if one takes out the next line, ‘to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures,’ is standard fare 2023 era progressivism.”

What really gets me is that the same TikTok social justice warriors will upload all kinds of content saying Christian nationalism is evil. They think that if they lose the next election, Christians are going to take over the government and enforce their values in the law of the land on issues like abortion or homosexuality and Christians are going to use government to oppress people.

Group of local pastors gathered to denounce this weekend’s conference calling their message of Christian nationalism dangerous ideology.

What makes this ideology an event so sneaky is their ongoing language about returning to God. However, Christian nationalism isn’t actually about the God of the Bible or the Jesus of our scriptures. What they want to return to is a system of power and control where white supremacy, patriarchy, guns, money, and power are all worshiped.

But those same people never say anything about the real danger of Muslim nationalism. In fact, the idea of Muslim nationalism being a threat to society is usually called an Islamophobic lie, but it is a real thing. It’s called Sharia law and it exists in countries all over the world. Osama bin Laden’s letter to the US criticizes the United States because, “Rather than ruling by the sharia of a law in its constitution and laws, you choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire.” I’d ask these TikTokers was Osama bin Laden right to demand that the United States “reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gamblings, and trading with interest, or else he and other terrorists will continue to attack the US”? What was the number one thing Osama bin Laden wanted America to do after the 9/11 attacks? Well, he made it clear in his letter that it wasn’t about colonialism, it wasn’t about nationalism, it was about religion.

He wrote, “What are we calling you to do and what do we want from you? One, the first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.” bin Laden then gives a description and argument for Islam that’s no better than the arguments in the previous episode I gave that debunked the common arguments for Islam. bin Laden wrote, “It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses, peace be upon him, and the inheritors of the real torah that has not been changed. Muslims believe in all of the prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all.” Except the Muslim view of salvation history is a grossly revisionist and mistaken one. And of course it is, because it was written from an early medieval perspective and is not divinely inspired. The Quran’s denial of Jesus’s crucifixion, for example, where the Quran says that Jesus was not crucified.

This is an event that all mainstream secular historians attest did happen. The fact that the Quran says this shows just how unreliable the text is. Robert Van Voorst in his excellent study of all the non-biblical ancient and medieval writings about Jesus says of the Quran’s testimony about Jesus, which remember was written 600 years after his death, that “scholarship has almost unanimously agreed that these references to Jesus are so late and tendentious as to contain virtually nothing of value for understanding the historical Jesus.”

Finally, in reading bin Laden’s letter, what struck me was an answer to a question a lot of people ask me in the comments section of last week’s episode on Islam. People said the arguments for Islam that I was critiquing were very weak, and I agreed. They even wondered in the comments section how anyone could belong to a religion that lacks so much evidence for it.

Well, one answer is that Islam was spread by conquest. While the first 300 years of Christianity involved the church spreading through evangelism and martyrdom, the first 300 years of Islam and long after that were spread primarily through military conquest, as is attested in numerous books on the subject. Osama bin Laden ended his letter to America in 2002 by saying, “This is our message to the Americans as an answer to theirs. Do they now know why we fight them? And over which form of ignorance by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?” Now, there are many Muslims who would reject the arguments bin Laden and other terrorists made for Islam and for violence in that letter and other publications. I would implore those Muslims to make their voices heard in the wake of non-Muslims who suddenly have become enamored with evildoers like Osama bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists, and I would implore young people who mistakenly embrace these anti-American, anti-freedom, and anti-Christian views to take a step back.

It’s okay to be critical of the US government. What’s great about living in America is that you can go out in the street or go online and complain as much as you want about the government and how bad a job it’s doing. And guess what? No one is going to show up in a black van and permanently disappear you in the middle of the night. You can post YouTube videos criticizing other religions or even the concept of religion, and you will not be stoned to death for blasphemy. You can eat what you want without being hung from a pole for breaking a fast, which happens to children in regions controlled by Muslim terrorist groups. And we can rejoice as Christians that Jesus Christ did not command us to fight in the cause of God as the Quran says, which bin Laden quotes in his letter. But Jesus instead told us to love our enemies, to pray for them. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called sons of God.” So let’s pray for peace to be restored in Israel and Gaza and for those who seek peace in this life to ultimately find it in Jesus Christ who is the prince of peace. So thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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