British newspaper The Guardian has removed from its website a 21-year-old message written by Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, after it was shared several million times on social media.
Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” began being shared on TikTok on Tuesday, sparking a fierce debate about US backing for Israel in its current war against Hamas.
Bin Laden was the mastermind of the September 11 attacks 22 years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people by crashing passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
The White House sharply criticized the online phenomenon and TikTok said it was taking measures to remove the posts involved.
The transcript includes bin Laden’s assertion that the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001 due to its support of Israel.
Links to the original were replaced on the Guardian website with a statement saying it had been shared “without the full context”.
“This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s ‘letter to the American people’, which was reported on in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002,” it wrote.
“The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.”
The White House in a statement on X, formerly Twitter, 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 worst slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust in the name of the same conspiracy theories,” it added.
