It Could Happen Here - The Tiktok Zoomer Bin Laden Episode

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

Robert, Garrison, James and Mia discuss the Tiktok zoomers discovering Osama Bin Laden's Letter to the American People, Bin Laden's actual motivations, and right wing anti-imperialismSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed. Thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. What America is tasting now is something insignificant to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years. Its sons are killed, its blood is shed,

its sanctuaries are attacked, and no one hears and no one heeds. Those words written by Osama bin Laden in October 7th, 2001, were part of his first statement issued after the 9-11 attacks. were part of his first statement issued after the 9-11 attacks. You might notice a few things about that. One is, of course, the glorying over the deaths of several thousand people. And another is that when it comes to his analysis of the cultural and psychological impact of 9-11 on the United States, he was more or less right. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart, and nothing better embodies the slow, sometimes rapid, collapse of the United States as our reaction to 9-11 and

our continuing responses to it. And so today I've got in the studio, we don't actually have a studio, I've got Mia, I've got James, and I've got Garrison. And we're going to talk about something you've probably encountered, which is that a letter to America written by Osama bin Laden, which is a different piece from the one I started this reading, but written along broadly similar lines, has started to go viral on TikTok. And if you've seen the reactions to it, it's a mix of a bunch of younger people on TikTok reactions to it. It's a mix of a bunch of, you know, younger people on TikTok reading this letter for the first time where bin Laden explains why he did, he believed 9-11 to be justified and going,

wow, he has a point. Some of them saying stuff that's more unhinged than that even. And then you've got this chorus of responses from both kind of centrist, you know, media figures, cultural commentators, pundits, and of course, right wing shitheads who are all making this out to be the left loves Osama bin Laden. We're going to get into kind of where the truth lies in this and also what is in the letter to America. But yeah, welcome. Welcome to the pod, everyone. Thanks, Robert. Horrible to be here.

How did you how did you all hear about about this new fun trend on the internet? I returned from spending my evening volunteering at the border in Hukumba to find a dearth of messages about an Osama bin Laden letter or the speech that you just read that I've assigned for probably a decade to undergraduates without anyone losing their mind. And yeah, extremely confusing vibes for me. Yeah, yeah. The first time I heard about it was the first post that I saw was it was only about a million views. It wasn't even that viral, which I guess might be true because TikTok is nuts. But yeah, I think it, I don't know, like I first ran into it on Twitter and I think by the time it hit Twitter, everyone

was just sort of in about 18 directions, completely losing their minds, which is just what that site is now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, probably a couple of videos of people dying just seems to pop up every time something gets discussed on Twitter now. I think that's an accurate description of kind of the fallout to it.

As we're writing that or as we're recording this, most of these original TikTok videos, people seem to be reading off of the Guardian's copy of Letter to America, which was, I guess, the most easy to Google prior to. I think it was the easiest to Google when this all started rolling. Google prior to, I think it was just the easiest to Google when this all started rolling. The Guardian took that down because they didn't want people reading it outside of the context of the article it's in. This was a horrible mistake. I have found a number of comments being like, this is them. They're trying to stop you from reading Bin Laden's words. We're all going to be on a watch list. They can't arrest all of us. You can still access the letter to America. Also, the sentiment that you can't arrest all of us suggests can you can still access the letter to america um also the uh the sentiment that you can't arrest all of us suggests that many of these people were not alive in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 which is certainly true they will fucking try they did they did try yeah um

just to be very clear you can still read this whole letter to yourself and so can everyone else it's on wiki source if you just google bin lad Laden letter to America, it will bring up the Wikipedia page that talks about this letter and its context. And that will also give you a link somewhere at the bottom to the Wikisource that's just the unedited translation of the letter to the American people. So it is not – like the Guardian's move was bad because of – they call it the Streisand principle, right? It is not like the Guardian's move was bad because of, they call it the Streisand principle, right? That if you like try to hide something from people on the internet, it just makes the problem worse.

You never do what the Guardian did. It's very dumb. Yeah, it was extraordinarily naive. Of course not. Why are we expecting reasonable actions from the TERF colony? I was going to say, yeah, they could have blamed trans people. I'm surprised we didn't get one of those in there uh they've been everyone's been trying to pivot very quickly to this so obviously you know my like james my opinions on this are kind of complex on one hand i am not an osama bin laden fan he was a bad person uh he was a terrible person

um and he did a lot of damage, not just to the United States. That said, I've also long been an advocate for like, he's probably going to go down as one of the most effective and intelligent military strategic minds of the 21st century. The September 11th attacks worked in large part, right? Because of how we reacted, because of the amount of money that we spent, the amount of people that we killed, the amount of anger that we engendered against the West, and the amount of damage that we did to our own society. A lot of the fallout that we're seeing and all these right-wing street gangs and shit, a lot of it traces back to fallout from

the wars that were started by the Bush administration after September 11th. And that was part of the stated goal, right? That was one of the things he was looking to provoke a reaction. So I'm both glad, hopefully some people are going to come away from this with a more nuanced understanding of the guy. And when I say nuanced, I don't mean in a moral sense, because it's bad to kill thousands of random people. But in the sense of like, oh, this was not, I think I need to play something for you guys. Because like, as a 9-11, like I was like nine or 10 when it happened. So I remember it all very well. And I remember the reaction to it. And I remember the propaganda we encountered. And there's this thing that you will

find written about fascists pretty regularly, which is that they both need an all-powerful enemy, but they also need an enemy that's like fundamentally free of virtue and intelligence and skill are virtues. So both in the wake of 9-11, you got this sort of Al-Qaeda and larger sort of Islamist movements were considered this nefarious force, as they are now in the wake of the attacks by Hamas, right? This nefarious force that is capable of infiltrating the US border and seeking terrorist cells into the United States to hit anybody. And at the same time, they're like primitive idiots who are bigots against – who are – they hate women and all this stuff, right? Like you can't see them as capable or intelligent because then that would be to give them a virtue that you reserve for yourself. Anyway, I think a good example of that

is this parody song by John Valby that I encountered in a Napster download when I was a child. Wait, is this Oben Laden? It's Oben Laden. Oh, it's the other one. Okay, okay. Yeah, this one's bad, folks.

You're going to hear something offensive. I'm playing it now because, number one, I think it's something people should remember or know, but also because we're about to play these TikTok responses to this Bin Laden video and read some comments of people who are very taken by it. And I want to set up what the pre-existing image of Bin Laden was in our our culture kind of prior to this

reappraisal of him um because i think that is important um but this is unhinged so and and it's pretty offensive so just be aware people i'm about to play it now can't wait oh yeah no you're gonna have all right can you see the the giant confederate this is from a john valby album i think it was called real woman do Play in Mud Puddles. I don't know. Maybe not. That may just be a random image. I did not check.

Describe this. There's the General Lee as a mudding truck with a giant Confederate flag behind it. And then with the Confederate flag like colors, the text Real Women Do Play in Mud Puddles. Then it says Southern Girl. Southern Girl on the windshield of the truck. So I'm going to start playing this song. I'm not going to play all of it, but this should set up for you kind of what the acceptable discourse

on Bin Laden was right after 9-11. Hey Well we come from Alabama But we're in Afghanistan Where Navy SEALs and Green Berets Hunting for a man They say he has a bearded face A diaper on his head I heard we won't be coming home Until that fucker's dead

Oh Bin Laden Oh don't you die too quick I've come to fuck your fanny with some anthrax on my dick So... Had you guys heard that before? No. Unfortunately. Yeah.

No, wow. Yeah. This is the part of America that I missed growing up abroad and will never fully understand. Now, we freezed about 30 seconds into that minute and 30 second song, but it was like playing random clips of art to go along with the music. And the one we paused on was Homer Simpson with an American flag behind him, outlined in red with a pistol in his hands aimed at a bug-eyed Osama bin Laden.

So great nuanced discourse here. So, so many memories. Like, I don't know what it was. People loved that. Like bug eyed bin Laden thing. This is like,

like everyone. I don't know why. No, I think I know. Oh, I pretty sure I know why, which is that. So one of the most popular pieces of like media,

popular media in response to the nine 11 attacks was an episode of South Park that came out literally like a week or two after the attacks, which. of like media, popular media in response to the 9-11 attacks was an episode of South Park that came out literally like a week or two after the attacks, which basically up until fairly recently, TV was always made on a significant delay. So there were no shows on air that could pivot to comment on something really quickly. The West Wing managed to kind of, but it was like a dog shit episode, but the South Park guys really pivoted and they put out this episode. It was basically like a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Cartman as Bugs Bunny and

Osama bin Laden as Elmer Fudd. Right. And there were a bunch of like scenes of him, like bug eyes bugging out when like shit would happen. And it was, it was weird because like the, I think the most people who watched it, including myself took it in the same manner of that song as like,

yeah, fuck these guys. These like, you know, in ways that were pretty bigoted. There was also like the episode opened with an extended bit of kids in Afghanistan with everything around them and all the adults getting murdered by us airplanes for no seeming reason,

which was like part of the anyway, whatever. I think one of the like what we're seeing in some of like why young people are reacting to this letter by bin Laden so strongly is they've never really gotten to appraise the guy objectively. And I'm not saying that that's happening across the board now, but I don't think the reactions are nearly as unreasonable as they're being painted. Yeah, he kind of existed as an avatar of evil and like with zero nuance or complexity, just like a satanic sort of totem in American culture. Yeah. Which is why I've always assigned it just like I think it behooves us to understand.

Yeah, I agree entirely so i went through and i looked at some of the tiktoks being made about this and first off um tiktok does seem to have taken some action to try to stop this i don't think it's going to work either but like when i typed in letter to america recently um the text i got on tiktok was this phrase may be associated with behavior or content that violates our guidelines. Promoting a safe, positive experience is TikTok's top priority. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can still find shit by typing in Bin Laden, but it's not as much shit as findable right

now. So worth noting. One of the first things I came across that was interesting is like, so there's this trend on TikTok, if you're not a TikToker. One sec, I'm going to play. What do these people do on TikTok? There's a lot of AI videos where either the text will be read by AI

with like images and video clips on screen, or there's some creepy instances of people just generating AI faces, sometimes of like actual murderers and criminals to talk about the shit they did. It's really weird. But one of the top videos I found on this from about a little less than a day ago is just the entire text of bin Laden's letter to America being read by an AI.

And it it sounds weird. I'm going to just let everyone get a listen to this. In the name of Allah, the most gracious the most merciful permission to fight against disbelievers is given to those believers who are fought against because they have been wronged and surely allah is able to give them believers victory i think it misses some of the some of the stirring new context yeah great rhetorical delivery no but you get the responses of this and like one of my favorite ones that I've got on the screen is Cheekus Fressa saying,

y'all are going to hate me, but he kind of ate. And then the first response is, no crumbs, which Garrison, as our Gen Z consultant, that means, like, I agree, basically? You know, it's hard to say. Oh, you're 21 now. You're out of touch. The first feeling old moment captured live.

Yeah, I think that means he like ate everything and there's like no crumbs left. Yeah, no. Oh, okay. That's good. Very literal. Yeah. I think that's what it means, but again, this is very particular kind of culture.

We're on the bleeding edge. The comment following that is bizarre. Trump isn't a good person either. The gay people have nothing to do with me. This does not say vote for Trump. I think you can't read. See, you know, it's... nothing to do with me this does not say vote for trump i think you can't read see i i this is you know it's it's and that's the op responding to no crumbs so i don't know what's missing here it's

really it's really hard to tell um yeah i think these people may be uh in a parallel reality i don't think really anyone who's participating in this trend is very intelligent or has very good media literacy or has really looked into like American imperialism very much. No. But we will get to that in a second. Yeah. So the next comment is so much truth coming out this season. And then I appreciated this from Walker. He lost me at the end.

He being bin Laden, with the religiously charged homophobia, but that left out, he was right about everything else, justified and well said. The voice of reason. The voice of reason. Yeah, well, but also... Also now, we'll get through it. There's a few more problems with the letter than that.

Yeah, I'm sorry. Doing 9-11, but with a pride flag is perfect. And I have no doubt. You can't remove those things from the rest of the letter and the action. No. They actually do create a complete whole. You can't actually pick and choose

little parts that you want. Yeah. It's like trying to pick and choose parts of QAnon. You're like, well, actually, there are rich people who are pedophiles. You're like, well, actually, there are rich people who are pedophiles. You're like, well, yes, but you can't like – you can't – that's not giving QAnon the benefit here. These are totally different things. And the thing that I think people should be doing, just so we're clear on like my stance here, is seeing bin Laden as an incisive and intelligent actor who had a significant degree of understanding of this country and its culture.

And the terrible things that he did were as effective as they were because he understood things about us that we should understand about us, right? Otherwise, you are not going to be able to successfully act within this culture to improve things and reduce harms. You need to understand why what he did worked as well as it did. And you need to understand what he knew about us, because it's pretty useful stuff to understand. That is different from saying that what he like, you don't have to view it as the truth, right?

Because it's not like the truth in any moral sense, but it's the truth in that like if you read some of Hitler's writings on democracy, Hitler accurately understood the vulnerabilities of a democratic system and how to exploit them. You should understand that. You're not saying, wow, he was spitting truth. You're just saying, yeah, well, some people are, Robert. That is a problem. Yeah. Some people, in fact, are. Do you know who else is spitting truth Robert our

advertisers yes that is right we are are we sponsored by the new edition of my comp at this point no we are sponsored by Al Bagdadi he's still alive folks yeah mm-hmm important

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being like yeah you know he was completely right about everything what a genius i love him but all of the comments were people being like that's fucking kind of crazy to say bro like yeah let's take a step back yeah the thing this reminds me of is this is a phenomenon i've run into with american maoists yeah we're like okay they'll read mao they'll read mao saying something that is you know perfectly reasonable like you should not talk about something unless you've researched it first. Yeah. Now, any normal person has heard this when they were like two. But these people apparently have never heard this and they run into it through Mao.

And they're like, holy shit. Mao is like the greatest living theorist. What a brilliant thinker. I don't know, man. You guys need Bin Laden to tell you the US sucks? Like, really? Yes, people do because they get dog shit history education in high school. Their education of 9-11 was the video I started this episode with. It's true.

It's like we failed as a country, like just completely. No, seriously, like a fucking horse that I will whip till it's dead is that like in 2016, there was this huge thing about we need to teach history properly and media literacy, right? After Donald Trump got elected because a lot of people didn't know what the fuck was going on. And then we just stopped and everyone was like, nah, fuck it, why not?

We'll just keep doing STEM, STEM, STEM. And then like teaching undergraduates often like intro courses for years, it's become very clear that we are completely failing in the United States to educate people or equip them with any understanding of American history. And so they just get propaganda. This is a big part of why I focus on crypto so much, because James, that is exactly where crypto comes from is we learned a lot of STEM shit, but we never learned any humanities or anything. So you get people saying stuff like, well, the underlying technology behind crypto is so impressive. And it's like, no, you can't point to a single useful piece of work it's ever done. You just find it impressive because there's a lot of complex math problems and that's what you value. Yes, because that is the yardstick of academic achievement or

intelligence yeah anyway speaking of people who are less intelligent than a yardstick it's not exactly what you said james but i also wanted to play here's a right-wing influencer who's collected a bunch of these videos i hadn't run into this guy before but oh no did they drop him too are they just purging everything no tikt TikTok has been removing all of this, almost all of the videos associated with this trend. You can find the compilations on Twitter are really some of the only ways that these videos are still alive.

Yeah, and this was a right-wing guy making fun of it. But man, that's interesting because this was like, I found this five minutes ago. So, I mean, I think this is the thing that like, it's really hard to talk about this without it being like an insane right-wing thing but tiktok is really americans only encounter with the way the chinese style censorship works which is they take a giant hammer and they just like hit things with it yeah it is as opposed like it's not it's not like targeted it's like

like we found everyone who said the word bin Laden and we banned it, right? Everything associated with the trend. Yeah. And this is the way that censorship stuff tends to work in China because it's kind of easy to do and it covers your ass. And so now Americans are experiencing this. I'm sorry.

I'm just enjoying seeing what Robert's have suggested for other TikToks you might like. Oh yeah. Thank goodness for the showers, top shelf products. Yeah. Hashtag a hair talk. Yep.

I, I, I'm, I'm a big fan of hair. I think it's because of this person, ear, ear, ear,

earth mother, earth mother, earth mother, basically. Yeah. Who actually, I brought her up specifically because she was an example of like the – the way this is getting portrayed in kind of like particularly like Twitter and more mainstream sort of descriptions of it is like all of these Gen Zers are full throat for Osama. They've all gone crazy.

And you can certainly find no shortage of those videos. I found a bunch of other videos that are more critical. It is difficult for me to tell what the preponderance of it is because there's not, no one's basing what they're saying on a sentiment analysis. They're basing it on what their timelines forwarded them based on their passion when they typed letter to America or whatever into Twitter or into TikTok. But like, I ran into this lady's video and like, so plenty of these are and I found others like this plenty of these are like know, say that they read Osama bin Laden's letter to America. And I've read the letter. And I understand that a lot of people are getting educated and kind of like deconstructing the propaganda that they've grown up in living in America.

But that does not mean that we should mystify these terrible people. Hitler also criticized the West and questioned the West and like how we operated over here. Osama Bin Laden's doing the same thing. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily wrong on what they're saying, but it doesn't take away the fact that they're sexist,

fascist, racist dictators. Yeah, I like this lady. That's a good video. Yeah, I think she kind of hits on one point that I've seen in some of the other like, for lack of a better term, pro-Osama bin Laden TikTok videos.

Pro-Bin Laden TikTok, yes, of course. People have been saying how like Bintok. People have been talking about how they're like finally seeing past US propaganda. They're deconstructing the lies that media has told them and this kind of gets at something that we see a lot and kind of in like cult spaces yeah is that you rarely ever just completely disengage from some form of propaganda you jump to a different form of propaganda

absolutely right it's like reading this letter, you're not getting like disillusioned from US propaganda. You're now buying into someone else's propaganda. Like the letter to America is a completely other version of conspiracy riddled propaganda that was put out for a political purpose.

And to try to engage with it in good faith is not the way to approach that text. And instead having Osama bin Laden be characterized as this like cartoonish evil that hates America for freedom and like hates America as a nation for its freedom. Like that – yes, that is propaganda. And if that's all you've had your whole life and you're now seeing this other side, this is probably like – this is definitely like mind-blowing. But like you can look into why these things happen without just falling for someone else's extremist propaganda. Like, like you can,

you can get into the actual reasons for why this happened. How, how us imperialism has caused the geopolitical situation coming out of the nineties. Like it's, it's lots of people have already done this reading. There's just, there's just plenty of people online who have not looked into this because

they have life. They're doing whatever, like, right. They, not everyone is like us and spends all of our time reading like political extremist literature yeah not not all of us have strong opinions on the different eras of bin laden writing um yeah like yeah he's like taylor swift in that sense yeah yeah i think there's there's another there's a thing that's also important here too which is i think you see this a lot in americans which is that americans will have this moment where they realize that they've been being lied to by the american media and then the thing this convinces them of is that everyone else is telling the truth. Yes. And it's like, no.

No, no, no. Every country is doing propaganda. All of the media is doing propaganda. Like, you can't just sort of ping pong from one country's media propaganda to another country's because they're all doing it. And the stuff that they're saying

also isn't true you have to actually like you have to actually try to work out the sort of the reality of history you can't just rely on reading like some other like some other propagandist version of events but this comes down to like a lack of a basic understanding of how we do history which i think is not anyone's fault it's because we don't teach it very well at all in schools but like the lack of basic understanding of how we do history, which I think is not anyone's fault. It's because we don't teach it very well at all in schools. But a lack of understanding of the difference between primary and secondary sources, right? And people

want to get straight to the source. So they'll go and read one historical primary source without the adequate secondary context and suddenly be like, oh shit! And yeah, it turned into a Maoist or a parent member of Al-Qaeda. This is why like,

you know, journalists do a lot of gathering, you know, what they can in the moment from a scene, from interviews and stuff. But academics, there's always going to be if it's like a good academic,

like I'm reading a great book right now on trust in unstable societies, societies like wracked by war. So it's like the concept of, it's written by a Gazan and it's about like how concepts of public trust fluctuate during conflicts. And he's looking at Lebanon. He's looking at Syria.

He's looking at Iraq. He's looking at Palestine. It's very interesting, but like, he's not just interviewing people. There's like a set of basically an algorithm that he runs his different interviews and like the overall sentiments expressed in them through in people, there's like a set of basically an algorithm that he runs his different interviews and like the overall sentiments expressed in them through in order to try and determine

like here is the aggregate of like what I found is a reaction to this question from like the people that I surveyed. It's the same kind of stuff that you do in a survey to attempt to add a little bit more rigor than just saying, well, I talked to 10 people and most of them said this. So clearly this is a trend, right? Which journalists are often guilty of and also just goes absent in part because of that. Twitter goes wild with this kind of shit. Just like, well, I looked through and I listened to 20 videos and most of them, the kids loved

Bin Laden. So the kids must love Bin Laden now, which I don't think is entirely fair. But I wanted to, I think it's probably a good time for us to go through the letter to America and talk about what is actually in this thing, right? Because you might as well know what's in it. It's a good thing to read. Again, you can find it on Wikisource. Yeah. So it starts with him kind of providing just some kind of Quranic justifications for the concept of fighting against an aggressor, fighting against like, you know, someone who is actively attacking you, which is more essentially how he positions like the relationship between the US and the Muslim world. in this piece is him talking about how the caliphate is being sort of like squashed and stopped from, you know, existing in the form that it should exist by this kind of constant,

both attacks on not just Arab democracy, but on like sovereign Arab states, as well as like support by the US for he complains a lot about corrupt rulers in the Muslim world. And he is talking about not just guys like Saddam, but like largely the Saudi royal family is a big part of it. He talks a lot about Iran and basically the, so that's kind of like a bit where a lot of his like grievances start. He does bring up, and one of the videos, james that you posted earlier was like an israeli man responding to this and basically characterizing in a very inaccurate form yes form saying like uh there's no facts in this letter like he doesn't like say anything true yeah where are his footnotes

yeah he's just angry at israel in palestine right he's just angry at like at that and he does bring up palestine multiple times. There's lines like the blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenge. That's a significant part of his case. But he also lists a lot of other areas, right? It is not just what's happening. It's not just what Israel is doing in Palestine that he's talking about. There's lines like, you attacked us in Somalia, you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon. And he brings all of those up several times.

He also, he does drop some facts in here. One of the more salient lines is, you have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every year. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3,000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down. And that's not an inaccurate thing to be, that's not an inaccurate statement or a thing to not be angry about. Now, that's not the full context of it, right? Because there is a bunch of stuff that is in here that is like bin Laden culture warshit that absolutely is not reasonable or a reason to bomb people. There's a point in the letter where he's like, what do we want from you, the Americans? What do we, Al-Qaeda, the people

who have attacked you, he's speaking kind of broadly for the Ummah here, what are we asking from you? And the first thing is that we are calling you to Islam, which I don't think is likely to happen. The second thing is we are calling on you to stop your oppression, lies, and immorality, and debauchery that has spread among you. We call for you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity, to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest. We call all of you that this, that you might be freed from what you have already been caught up in, that you might be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation.

And you may recognize that as a pretty insane reason to kill 3,000 people. There's gambling. I mean, like, I think a big part of the framing of this entire thing is like people are taking this as being like oh look at all these justified reasons because the US was was complicit and active in mass violence in

the Middle East but like he's not actually critiquing violence or political violence because he is pro political violence what he is critiquing is Western degeneracy. Like that is that is his actual thing. The first ask is to is to convert over to a fascistic version of his religion. Yeah.

Like that's the primary thing. This isn't about like U.S. imperialism in terms of what his end project is. And he's also – when he's angry about violence, it is specifically violence against Muslims, right? Because again, bin Laden is fine with doing violence to – and having the state potentially do violence to non-Muslims in his ideal state. He also – we read he is very right when he says that the United States is complicit in the deaths of over a million Iraqis because of our sanctions. This is in the pre-invasion period. One of the worst crimes this country has been complicit in within our lifetimes. Absolutely a fucking nightmare. He devotes as much time to that as he does to this next paragraph I'm going

to read you, which is another one of his grievances. Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office? After that, you did not even bring him to account, other than that he made a mistake, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and be remembered by nations?

He's like, it's fucked up that you killed a million people. The worst thing you did was let your president get a blow job like that is part of this letter and that's a crazy person thing to think yeah like that's that that's just him being an asshole um because not really a problem right there's personal problems right but on the scale of like american crimes the fact that we didn't force bin lot or force clinton out of office not really on the list yeah does not really make the cut yeah there is a long list and that does not make it yeah uh then of course he's got he also spends actually more time on the sex trade than he does on what the u.s did to iraq

you are a nation that practices the trade of sex and all its forms directly and indirectly giant corporations and establishments are established on this under the name of art, entertainment, tourism, and freedom and other deceptive names you attribute to it. And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were

unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man that you brought AIDS as a satanic American invention. It's a very basic reactionary screen. It's like, in the past go ahead and boast to the nations of man that you brought aids as a satanic american invention it's it's it's a very basic reactionary screen it's like yes you can you could do the same thing with like sections of hitler speeches talking about like working conditions and factories right you could take little sections put them on tiktok make it make it be read by an ai voice they'll be like oh wow this is a really good critique of capitalism you're missing the entire point of what Hitler's actual political project is

this is the exact same thing it is this is the thing reactionaries do they will take a few of these points talking about imperialism talking about capitalism and then wrap it in a fascistic package

like that that is their entire political goal it's it's the entire way they recruit it's how they spread their propaganda it's how they get people to believe conspiracy theories yeah yeah and we american people especially will be incredibly vulnerable to it because they'll look at the critiques which which are in some cases reasonable, right? He's not wrong about every critique he has, but the fact that he is valuing the murder through starvation of a million or more people with Bill Clinton getting the blowjob is not something you should miss in your interpretation of the validity of his points.

Yeah, this is not a guy you need to agree with. No. Under no circumstances guy you need to agree with. No. Under no circumstances do you have to hand it to Osama bin Laden. Once again, drill. Yeah, it's certainly a weird one. The reaction to it has been equally weird and equally misleading. Yeah, and the reaction to the reaction like yeah it shouldn't be that fucking hard for us to be like america shouldn't have through sanctions killed

millions of children and done a bunch of war crimes all over the world osama bin laden bad dude we can take that middle path hey guys i'm kate max You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know,

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understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I do want to get into a little more before we finish our talking about this. Some of the lines that I think are really igniting some of these people who are now pro-Bin Laden TikTokers, because it makes sense to me that there are bits of this that really grab people. And I'm going to read a couple of them. One of them is this line here. The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only.

As for the West of the world, you impose on them your monstrous, destructive policies and governments, which you call the American friends. You prevent them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic Party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them to attack them with tanks and guns to imprison them and torture them. A new lesson from the American book of democracy. And like, yeah, there's some valid stuff in that paragraph, right? There's some there's some points he's making there that people who have started to get people who have just gotten out of like their parents bubble uh and who are starting to become aware of the world and history and the u.s's place in it um i see why especially if they encounter stuff like that out of context they will find that intriguing because that's a a fairly lucid and reasonable sentiment of a horrible thing that this country has been involved in

um there's a couple it's also nothing that hasn't been said better by other people. You can find it being said well ahead of bin Laden saying it, by people who did not kill thousands. I want to sort of, you know, maybe this is too late in this episode for anyone to still be listening to this, but I

want to sort of make an appeal to people who are discovering anti-colonialism for the first time, sort of in the wake of this and in the wake of Israel committing a genocide. And the thing that's – there's something very important to understand about anti-colonialism, which is that anti-colonialism is not a single coherent set of politics. No. There are many, many different types of anti-colonial politics, and those different versions of anti-colonialism wind up with completely different politics. And this is something, you know, internationally, there was a very important distinction to be made

between left and right-wing anti-colonialisms. In the US, I mean, we don't have this, right? Like this is sort of the problem with Americans encountering this for the first time is we don't have left and right-wing anti-colonialism because the US is the world's premier colonial power. But in a lot of parts of the world, there is right-wing anti-colonialism because the US is the world's premier colonial power. But in a lot of parts of the world, there is right-wing anti-colonialism. And the core difference here is there are people who hate colonialism because of their sort of deep and abiding principled opposition to oppression and exploitation.

And there are people who hate colonialism because their empire lost a war and they want to go back to being an empire again. Yeah. And what kinds like which version of this politics people take up often has a lot to do with their class position and their, you know, their sort of like ethnic racial or position in the preexisting society's hierarchy. And that's something very important about bin Laden that you can't get from either of the American nationalists. They hate us for our freedom shit. And you also can't get from bin Laden's own description of his motivation. Yeah. And the thing that's important here,

right. Is that, you know, Osama bin Laden is not some Palestinian kid who picked up an AK after the Israelis murdered his family. Osama bin Laden is one of the heirs to the Saudi bin Laden group. And this is a second, I need to stop. We need to stop for a little bit and talk about the differences

between American and Saudi capitalism, because they're not structured the same way. And one of the sort of big differences here is that the Saudi bin Laden group isn't like, it's not like a company, right? It's a conglomerate. And what this means is that you know is that bin laden's family the like the the people who own the bin laden group which is founded by his dad they don't own one company they own 500 companies the the american equivalent to who bin laden is

is like it's it's it's imagine if one of jeff bezos's kids went to like a church like an orthodox church of ukraine seminary school and then got his dad to like go like pay for him to go do war tourism in ukraine and then got a group together to like fly a plane to the kremlin yeah it became like a weird like trad nazi extremist that would be kind of cool it would be funny but like but that's the thing. He's not... Bin Laden is not a sort of moral authority on Islamic resistance to American imperialism.

He's a rich fail son who had this combination of regurgitated Saeed Qutb and a bunch of his dad's money and money from Pakistani intelligence. That allowed him to do everything that he did. That's the thing that allowed him and sort of, you know, that allowed him to do everything that he did. Right. That that's the thing that allowed him and not, you know, like that kid in like that, that kid in Gaza picked up an AK. Like, that's the thing that allowed him to declare war in the US. And I want to read his account of what he actually thinks happened to the US. us this is this is this is from that same uh this this is from that same letter you are the nation that permits usury which has been forbidden by all religions yet you build your economy and

investments on usury as a result of this in all its different forms and guises the jews have taken over your economy through which they have then taken control of your media and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense. Precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against. So I want to like, like, like think for like, I want people to sort of stop and like, look at what he's actually saying here. His argument for why the US is an imperialist power is that it is controlled by Jews who control the economy and the media

and has enslaved the rest of the U.S. to do their will. And this is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, word for word, a Nazi analysis of what happened to the U.S. And this is what right-wing anti-colonialism is, right? You look at like the sort of horrors of colonialism go, oh, this is bad. And then when someone asks you, okay, why is this happening? You unload this like utterly half-assed pile of anti-semitic conspiracy theories instead of like

an analysis of capitalism like he thinks the the source of like american like imperialism and capitalism is interest-bearing loans yeah yeah this is nonsense and that's what he means whenever he talks about usury which like by the way as a heads up, every Muslim country that I am aware of has banks that do what is effectively usury. It's just OK. So if you know anything about like Orthodox Judaism, right, you are not supposed to do anything on the Sabbath. And so some people do keep that. You're not even supposed to turn on a light, right? anything on the Sabbath. And so some people do keep that. You're not even supposed to turn on a light, right? Like one of the old ways this was expressed is like you would light candles

the night before the Sabbath so that you could have some burning on the Sabbath. Today, there are ways around it that are like, you get lights that are scheduled to go on and off at certain hours. And it's always, it's kind of funny. There's a lot of jokes about this. You get from like Jewish comedians being like, do you think God is like tricked by your rules lawyering and stuff? But there are banks in the Muslim world that are the banking equivalent of that, where what they're doing isn't technically taking interest, but like it works out to be the same thing for them.

They've just, they're just getting around. Anyway, I think that's an important piece of context. It's like the Catholic church deciding that fish and chicken aren't meat, so you can eat them on the fasting day. Yeah, where it's like, really, guys? Do you think that's what God wants you to do?

You think God is like, oh, yeah, no, I never meant for those things to be meat. The omnipotent God is like, oh, damn, they got me with that chicken shit. That ain't a cow. God's seeing it. Yeah, I do actually, you have to credit Chick-fil-A for being closed on Sunday a little, I guess, but I love the idea of like God going to like watch a Catholic congregation go to breakfast and get their fucking

like chicken sandwiches and going, ah, you crafty bastards. Got me again, guys. I didn't think you'd eat those guys. They're so gross. That is kind of how the catholic god works yeah he's like set up a little sudoku for you he's just thrilled that you're getting that yeah like when the hamster has to press a button to get its food yeah yeah yeah but i want to i

want to bring it back to bin laden for a second because I think part of what's going on here is something that isn't – I don't know. Bin Laden is a product of his specific context, right? And his specific context is that he grew up in one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. And I guess this is the thing I think we should actually, I should actually mention. I'm being slightly unfair to the Taliban when I, when I talk about them having loans because the Taliban are from a different, like, school of Islamic jurisprudence than Al-Qaeda is, even though they sort of, they kind of work together sometimes. But like, you know, but the thing, like the sort of Wahhabi school that like bin Laden is from, right? that bin Laden is from, right? The reason he has a right-wing anti-colonial critique is he's absorbed this sort of social mores and he's absorbed the involved in the slave trade level

of anti-blackness that you get from the Sauds. He's absorbed their anti-Semitism. He's absorbed all of these things. And this is what he sort of like has constructed as the reason, you know, and filtered through his sort of cobbling together of like different sort of like, like of like Saeed could have been of sort of like different sort of Islamic

thinkers. Like this is what he's assembled together. And it's this thing that it's not a stable, coherent critique of the U S it's, it's, it's, it's this thing that it's not a stable coherent critique of the u.s it's it's it's it's this like it's all of his sort of like weird prejudices and hang-ups like grafted onto anti-colonialism and being able to tell the difference between someone who is a genuine anti-colonialist and someone who is doing this stuff or like who wants their empire back or who is like you know like pissed off that gay people exist like that that is something that is genuinely very important

and it's something that's made enormously harder to do by the way that he like you know by by the american education system by the way people are raised to think about media yeah yeah or raised to think about media. Yeah. Yeah. Well. This is the Bin Laden rant. Yeah.

We can always stand to do more Bin Laden rants. Maybe I'll do another episode on them on Bastards one of these days. But yeah, good stuff. I do want to kind of close by reading another bit from OBL, our friend of the pod. This one's from 2004, October 29th. And I think it's relevant as we look at the different ways the current president of the United States, the former and possibly future president of the United States are talking

about dealing with problems like Islamic extremism. Because I think bin Laden's words here are pretty salient. And this comes from a comment he made. It wound up airing on Al Jazeera, criticizing George Bush ahead of the 2004 election. Your security is not in the hands of Democratic candidate John Kerry or President George Bush or Al Qaeda.

Your security is in your own hands. We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of Kings. They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed,

and thievery. And again, not wrong, not wrong about most Muslim majority nations and not wrong about most Western nations. And it's a good analysis of the Bushes too because the Bushes were friends with the Bin Laden family. Yes, yes.

And they are also as close as the US has to royalty. As is Trump. Maybe the Kennedys. Maybe the Kennedys. But another presidential candidate, Mia. Complete with the insane inbred guy who's

losing his mind yes anyway anyone else got anything no I'm just baffled yeah well

I'm happy I'm having a good time you know get on tick-tock let people know that you love terrorism yeah it can't go

wrong for you yeah alternatively get on Twitter or wherever YouTube and film you love terrorism. Yeah, it can't go wrong for you. Yeah. Alternatively, get on Twitter or wherever, YouTube, and film an angry video in your car

about how all of Gen Z unironically loves Osama bin Laden and supports the mass killing of civilians. Do either. Those seem to be the two primary things

people are doing right now. So get out and join the herd, everybody. It's fun. What a great place. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could

Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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