Biden White House Can’t Believe It Has To Say This But Bin Laden Bad
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
President Joe Biden’s White House has found itself in the surreal position of having to point out that Osama bin Laden is not — what’s the word? — good but is in fact — how to put this — bad.
In a statement emailed to Mediaite, White House senior communications adviser Andrew Bates made several key points about the deceased and presumably moldering plotter of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Bates wrote:
- There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history – highlighting them as his direct motivation for murdering 2,977 innocent Americans.
- And no one should ever insult the 2,977 American families still mourning loved ones by associating themselves with the vile words of Osama bin Laden.
- Particularly now, at a time of rising antisemitic violence in the world, and just after Hamas terrorists carried out the worst slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust in the name of the same conspiracy theories.
- Like President Biden said this year in remembrance of the Americans who lost their lives because of Osama bin Laden, “it’s more important now than ever that we come together” against a “rising tide of hatred and extremism.”
The reason the White House had to send out this statement is that a flood of TikTok users has begun posting videos of themselves agreeing with bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America” — which was filled with anti-American and anti-Semitic justifications for the attacks.
The Guardian removed the text of the letter from its webpage in response, writing “We have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead.”
TikTok responded with a statement that read “We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate. This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
