An important historical document. Though published all over the Internet, it was most linked-to where it was housed by The Guardian, the British newspaper.
But it has been taken down by The Guardian. This is what it says on the page where it formerly resided:
Removed: document
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. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.
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.
Just like the news media, claiming their coverage provides full context, but deprecating the primary source document itself!
Orwellian.
In an article on Thursday, “TikTok ‘aggressively’ taking down videos promoting Bin Laden ‘letter to America,’” The Guardian explains some of the background of the current fracas. Youngsters on TikTok and elsewhere had recently discovered Osama bin Laden’s letter — which Representative Ron Paul has often famously referenced — and were expressing their surprise, interest, and judgments on social media. Many of them were awful takes, of course, as is common among the young … and others.
But remember the keywords: free speech.
Under pressure from politicians, bureaucrats, Jewish activist groups, and conservative influencers, the free speech of users of Tik Tok and X (to name just two) were abridged, disallowed from expressing their opinions of — or even quoting — the late terrorist.
TikTok explained itself on X: “Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”
Discussing the letter is not, of course, “supporting” “terrorism.”
Yet Osama’s letter has been scrubbed from most websites that had published it. It can nevertheless be found, by paying subscribers, at scribd.com — at least it could as of Sunday.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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