White House spokesman Andrew Bates offered an official response from the White House on Thursday regarding the now-viral TikTok trend of users praising terrorist and 9/11 orchestrator Osama bin Laden.
“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,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.
“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 world slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust in the name of the same conspiracy theories,” he said.
“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.”
Meanwhile, The Guardian, which published the full text of the letter in 2002, pulled the page down this week, recognizing that it was being “widely shared on social media without the full context.”
“Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead.”
A TikTok spokesperson also said that “content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism” and added that the company was “proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”
More over at The New York Post:
White House blasts those sharing bin Laden’s ‘repugnant, evil and antisemitic lies’ as an ‘insult’ to 9/11 victims https://t.co/UHfA4R3GU2 pic.twitter.com/FaVVcwV2pE
— New York Post (@nypost) November 17, 2023