I’m told that Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the Americans” is currently trending on TikTok, and that some people have encountered my short pedagogical paper about it from the Winter 2017 issue of Reason Papers.

The paper began life as a presentation to the 2011 conference of the Association of Core Texts and Courses, which explains the somewhat cryptic references in it to “dialectic” and “the Core” (“dialectic” was, if I remember, part of the official theme of the conference). The presentation later became a contribution to RP‘s “Afterwords” section, where it was called “You’ve Got Mail: Teaching Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to the Americans,‘” Reason Papers 39:2 (9 page PDF).

Three relevant companion pieces are “Why They Hate Us: A Pedagogical Proposal,”  “Terrorism Justified,” and (with Gary Alan Fine), “Celebrating Arabs and Kindly Terrorists: Rumor and the Politics of Plausibility.” All three links now go to PDFs of the actual papers, the third on Gary Fine’s Academia.com page.

Thanks to Zach Day for calling the TikTok trend to my attention. Feel free to comment on any of this here, but as remarked previously, I won’t at present be participating in the discussion.

I just discovered, completely incidentally, that bin Laden’s Letter is now reflexively being “cleansed” from the Internet out of fear that the young might actually read and engage with it. If you want a perfect exemplification of the utter hypocrisy and abject cowardice of the guardians of “Western Civilization,” that’s really all you need to see. After centuries of horseshit about “free inquiry” and whining complaints about “cancel culture,” here they are hiding desperately from reality and praying to the Ignorance God that you’ll do the same. For a published copy of the Letter, try Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, edited by Bruce Lawrence. While you’re there, you might want to pick up a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, before someone burns it.