A.S. Ibrahim: When terrorist propaganda goes viral

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 21st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Why did some young people who never experienced 9/11 all the sudden find a hero in the man behind the terror attacks that claimed 3,000 American lives? Here’s WORLD Opinions commentator A.S. Ibrahim.

A.S. IBRAHIM, COMMENTATOR: For more than 22 years, the majority in the West has rightly considered radical Islamist Osama bin Laden to be an evil terrorist.

However, in a confused world largely driven by social media clicks, some young Americans are now sympathetic to the orchestrator of the 9/11 attacks. They are glorifying him as a hero and claiming his actions were justifiable. Many TikTok users with large followings have been encouraging their followers to reevaluate Bin Laden’s image and actions. In particular, these young keyboard zealots naively claim that Bin Laden was seeking to “resist” the evil of American support for Israel.

How did this saga begin?

Some TikTok users came across Bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America”—an open letter that he reportedly issued one year after 9/11. In this letter, Bin Laden tried to justify killing Americans, precisely because of U.S. support of Israel. He also criticized the United States for rejecting the Islamic Sharia in its governing system.

The letter went viral when TikTok users shared it and encouraged large numbers of followers to read it. Many TikTok users declared they had made a discovery into the supposed reason behind the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict. Simplistically, many concluded that America and Israel are the oppressors while the Palestinians are innocent victims.

Two observations are worth noting.

First, it is evident that uncontrolled social media consumption by young Americans leads to grotesquely misguided ideas and creates propagandists and sympathizers for terrorists. We saw this recently with Hamas sympathizers and now with fanciful dreamers glorifying Bin Laden.

This development highlights a lamentable failure of parenting. Parents gave away their sacred duty to teach their children to discern right from wrong and basic lessons of history, in this case the unmatched role the United States has played in world affairs and the unique good America accomplished in many ways.

When American children don’t learn at home how evil Bin Laden was, we end up with a TikTok drive to glorify a terrorist as a victim. Bad ideas can only grow in soils of ignorance. If parents don’t teach their children how to love and cherish their country, we end up with ignorant keyboard influencers who destroy lives.

Second, it is abundantly clear that our education system is cursed with twisted ideologies, including Critical Theory and postcolonial theory. In the former, the world is simplistically seen through the lens of oppressor-oppressed, and Bin Laden is not identified as the oppressor. In the latter, the Western nations are portrayed as merely bad colonizers who have done no good whatsoever in the world. Here, too, Bin Laden’s image is not a terrorizer of innocent people, but a “resister” of bad Westerners.

These sick ideologies give way to other poisonous ideologies like Islamism, especially as our schools shield Islam from any critical evaluation. In this confused environment, Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” becomes celebrated, although it is a textbook of harmful claims and radical Islamism.

Let’s be clear. Bin Laden was an evil terrorist and a mass murderer—not a victim. His glorification on social media carries a loud warning for every good American. There is malicious ignorance and fanciful lunacy circulating in our midst. Poisonous ideas must be exposed and defeated. We cannot afford to lose this fight.

I’m A. S. Ibrahim.

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