ROGER KIMBALL: Flirtation With Evil Will Not End Well for Leftists.
In some ways, the letter is run-of-the-mill Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-style Islamic insanity. Naturally, “the Jews” figure prominently as the boogeyman of history, abetted by horrible America. But the presentation is leavened by the fact that bin Laden had recently been responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. That sort of thing, beyond the capacity of your usual speaker’s corner blowhard, tends to concentrate the mind. The videos, made exclusively, I believe, by women, are a different story. You’ll find them hard to come by now. TikTok, responding to public outcry, intervened to squash searches for them as well as “#lettertoamerica,” “osama letter,” and similar directives.
That may buy the company a little time in the court of public opinion. But more and more Americans, I suspect, have come around to Josh Hawley’s perspective about TikTok. It is, he just said on X, “a spy app for the Chinese Government—and now it’s a hotspot for antisemitic, pro-Hamas propaganda.”
Bingo. Sen. Hawley got it in one. The sudden resurrection of Osama bin Laden did not take place in a vacuum. It is happening in the midst of a recrudescence in America of an anti-Semitism more vicious than anything seen in decades in this country, maybe ever. The large-scale pro-Hamas public demonstrations are startling in their size and virulence. Equally shocking are the displays of violent (and, it should be noted, historically illiterate) anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses.
It is curious how people romanticize evil and insanity. The habit, I believe, is born in part of naiveté, or at least inexperience. The college student who prances about in a T-shirt bearing the image of Che Guevara, for example, generally has no idea of what a malignant figure Che was, how treacherous, how cruel, how murderous. He sees only a handsome “freedom fighter” swaddled in the gauze of exotic Latin flamboyance. The grubby reality escapes her entirely. Ditto with respect to Hamas.
As Charles Cooke adds, “Face It, the bin Laden TikTokers Are Just Stupid.”
“I suppose the only good thing that has happened here,” Cooke remarked mordantly, “is for once the people of TikTok have stopped claiming that George W. Bush carried out 9/11 and have now acknowledged that it was Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, they have appended the word ‘good’ to that analysis.
“And these people are stupid,” he continued. “We can talk around this if we want to, but these people are stupid. They don’t know anything.”
He said that if a conservative opposes gay marriage, he becomes a non-person. “But when Osama bin Laden says that homosexuality must be banned in the new caliphate,” he noted, “they skip over it*. There’s so much in that bin Laden letter that should have been appalling to the TikTok brigade, but they seem to ignore it.”
Roger Kimball believes that “TikTok’s days may be numbered in the U.S.” Much faster, please.
* Same with the aforementioned Che Guevara as well, of course.