Osama bin Laden’s Revenge

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

According to the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, the September 11 attacks were supposed to be the first of a three-stage assault on the United States.

 

In one of his FBI interrogations, Lindh — who had direct contact with Osama bin Laden and was informed of al-Qaeda’s preparation for attacks inside the United States — said that 9/11 was just the beginning. The “second attack would involve attacking nuclear facilities, oil/gas pipelines, or some kind of biological attack,” the FBI’s report read. Part two would “bring the U.S. to its knees,” Lindh contended. A third unspecified attack would “finish it off.”

 

Lindh’s confessions were made public in late October 2002, when 9/11 was still fresh and the Islamist terrorist threat pronounced. Only months earlier, on the Fourth of July, an Egyptian gunman had stormed the ticketing counter at Los Angeles International Airport and shot two Israeli El Al employees to death. Weeks later, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo executed a campaign of sniper attacks targeting Washington, D.C.–area residents, killing ten and wounding three more. Islamist mass casualty events in Israel, Kuwait, Kenya, Yemen, Russia, and Bali, Indonesia — where a suicide bomber targeted a Western tourist trap on October 12, killing more than 200 — demonstrated that the Global War on Terror was truly a world war.

 

It was only the following month that bin Laden’s “Letter to America” began circulating inside the United States.

 

Given all that preceded it, the letter got an understandably poor reception, but it was not dismissed as a document unworthy of study. Surprisingly enough, the terrorist kingpin’s indictment of the United States touched only cursorily on its foreign policy (and in delusionally unpersuasive fashion, at that). What the letter revealed was that bin Laden’s problem was primarily with the Jews.

 

“The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and [Americans] are the leaders of its criminals,” OBL fumed. America’s presence in Saudi Arabia, by invitation and as a legacy of the 1991 war that had ejected Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, was a grave insult to the “ummah.” So, too, are American liberties, which allow for “immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.” He charged the United States with releasing AIDS into the wild and waging a campaign of environmental destruction as represented by, of all things, the Senate’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Each of America’s allegedly nefarious acts was, bin Laden claimed, the work of a secretive Hebraic sect. “Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy,” he concluded.

 

At the time, the letter was held in nearly universal contempt. Now, 25 years later, the ghost of bin Laden has managed to establish a credulous new audience.

 

Within a few years of its initial circulation, the letter was getting a second look.

 

“Let me begin by describing bin Laden’s view of history less inflammatorily — not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric,” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in a 2007 review of a book by the international relations theorists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who have both since become reliably caustic critics of U.S. foreign policy and its close relationship with Israel.

 

Goldberg was not a fan of Mearsheimer and Walt’s own line of “Judeocentric” thought. He found their contention that Congress was controlled by the Israel lobby (they were ahead of their time) unconvincing, and he took special exception to Mearsheimer’s apparent enthusiasm for bin Laden’s works:

 

At Politics and Prose, Mearsheimer uttered this remarkable statement: “Osama bin Laden wanted very much to make sure that the attacks struck at Congress, which he saw — quite correctly — as the location of the critical support of the United States for Israel.” Mearsheimer seemed pleased, rather than appalled, that bin Laden’s analysis of Congress’s priorities squared so perfectly with his own.

 

“Who really benefits from making anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism seem so indefensible?” Goldberg asked in conclusion.

 

Fast-forward 16 years. About a month after the October 7 massacre, the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since 1945, bin Laden’s letter not only resurfaced but became a sensation among youngish social media users, particularly on the then-Chinese-owned platform TikTok.

 

“When you read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America, and you realize you’ve been lied to your whole entire life,” one commenter said directly into her camera as she brushed her hair. “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie,” read the caption beneath another user’s video of her dishwashing routine. “If we’re going to call Osama bin Laden a terrorist,” said one ensorcelled teen, “so is the American government.”

 

The combination of narcissism and solipsism, all in service to the promotion of a criminally insane worldview, perfectly captures the madness of the social media age.

 

Some claimed that the letter’s resurgence was an inorganic phenomenon. Blame it on the popular online journalist Yashar Ali’s “compilation” of the pro-bin Laden videos, each of which would have received less attention than they got collectively. Others insisted that the letter’s renaissance was a work of Chinese statecraft — a “proxy war” against Israel amid its ongoing hostilities with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was comforting to believe that bin Laden’s rationalizations for mass violence didn’t have a real constituency in America. If only that were true.

 

In December 2023, a J.L. Partners poll sponsored by the Daily Mail found that, while 81 percent of all Americans expressed negative views toward bin Laden, about 30 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds were willing to tell the pollster that OBL’s antisemitic views and violent actions represented a “force for good.” That’s not a small number. Nor can it be dismissed as a youthful provocation designed to shock the elders. Positive retrospectives on bin Laden have since taken on a life of their own.

 

It was only weeks ago that Tucker Carlson squinted inquiringly as independent journalist Glenn Greenwald gushed over bin Laden’s letter, calling it a comprehensive deconstruction of the myth that the Islamists hated America only for its freedoms. The youngsters who only just discovered OBL’s missive were “shocked to discover this history that they had never been told,” Greenwald insisted. By that, he meant America’s support for Israel and its violation of Saudi Arabia’s “sacred soil.”

 

In the wake of the slaughter of Australian Jews on Bondi Beach in 2025, the British “pro-Palestinian activist” Moazzam Begg heaped praise on bin Laden’s prose, hailing the jihadist as the “voice of freedom.” Earlier this year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim charity in America and an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing scandal, produced a back-to-school reading list that included bin Laden’s manifesto.

 

CAIR is one of several high-dollar institutional contributors to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign, which makes sense. El-Sayed could not bring himself to commemorate the 9/11 attacks without also condemning America’s response to those attacks. The candidate has surrounded himself with figures like the streamer Hasan Piker, who famously claimed that “America deserved 9/11.”

 

If the United States didn’t exactly “deserve” those attacks, they certainly created the conditions for them, according to the Democratic nominee for Congress in Colorado’s first district, Melat Kiros. The September 11 attacks were “inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East,” she said, presumably referring to the multinational coalition that liberated Kuwait. That act, Kiros added, “forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response.”

 

Kiros may soon be headed to Congress, along with Adam Hamawy, the Democratic nominee in New Jersey’s twelfth district, despite his work for an al-Qaeda-linked charity in 1994 and his genuine friendship with the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman. In a post-9/11 edict smuggled out of prison, Rahman urged “Muslims everywhere to dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships . . . shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.”

 

“He did speak about violent things,” Hamawy said in condemnation of his friend’s rhetoric. “But it wasn’t the only thing he spoke about.” Sure. Hitler loved dogs, and bin Laden was an avid soccer fan and an amateur poet. Individuals contain multitudes. But to focus on that at the expense of their most evil and lasting contributions to history is an act of conspicuous charity.

 

When bin Laden’s letter was published, the Western world was still arguing over whether the War on Terror was a “clash of civilizations.” That language has fallen out of fashion, but it remains the most apt description of what that conflict was and remains. In the decades since 9/11, the threat posed by transnational terrorism has receded amid its battlefield defeats. But the casus belli that those 19 hijackers nursed has found a new and receptive audience among the Westerners whose civilization they set out to destroy.

 

That audience, now entering or in adulthood, is unmoored from history, ungrateful toward those who created the prosperity and safety they had the good fortune to be born into. And they will vote. When they do, they will take with them their chilling disregard for the sacrifices Americans who came before them made to preserve their liberty.

 

So, what kind of America will they vote for?