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.
Him saying the Americans and Jews are against them might be related to, you know, the fact that the Americans and the Zionists were (and are) actively stealing their land and resources.
The only thing that is incorrect is him using Jews instead of Zionists, however since Zionists actively refer to themselves as Jews this is an understandable mistake (but not one we should continue to make) .
Ok I think you may be thinking that I’m blaming Islam on this. I’m not. I’m an ex-muslim myself, so I know the religion and nothing in the Quran tells Muslims to hate Jews or whatever, the opposite actually. He’s using religion as an excuse despite it saying otherwise, which makes others who don’t know about religion blame the religion or culture for his actions.
Also I know the issue is Zionists and Zionists have done a great job conflating Zionism and Judaism. But the letter says both Jews and Zionists in different places, because bin laden was conflating them himself. Not right, but still that does show some antisemitism there that he continuously conflates the two, leading him to blame Jews sometimes rather than clearly being against Zionism.