The most disturbing thing in the newly released 9/11 files is not how little the United States knew before September 11, 2001. It is how much it knew and still failed to understand what al-Qaeda was becoming.
The newly released 9/11 Commission summary of the President’s Daily Briefs, or PDBs, shows that years before the attacks, intelligence reaching the president warned that Osama bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States. It reported that his network had infrastructure in North America, warned about hijackings, described operatives testing airport security and, in September 1998, raised the possibility that a group connected to the East Africa embassy bombings might fly an explosive-packed airplane into an American city.
That was three years before American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. The United States did not fail to notice al-Qaeda. It failed to understand what kind of enemy it faced.
Washington knew bin Laden was a threat. The CIA tracked his organization, the United States launched cruise missiles against his camps, the FBI investigated his supporters, and presidents were repeatedly briefed on the risks. But the files released this week show that al-Qaeda was still being viewed largely through the framework of terrorism we already knew: bombings, hostage taking, attacks against American facilities overseas, and hijackings in which terrorists seized an aircraft to make demands.
Reading these documents through an intelligence and targeting lens, the problem was not simply a lack of information. Important pieces were already there. The harder failure was recognizing that those pieces were describing an enemy that was innovating operationally, taking familiar terrorist methods and repurposing them in ways our assumptions did not account for.
The Warning Was There
Intelligence is rarely clean. A report does not become fact because it appears in a classified document. Analysts have to judge sources, weigh reliability, challenge assumptions, and separate credible reporting from rumor. The lesson in these files is not that we should have believed every warning. It is that the reporting changed before our understanding of the enemy did.
A July 1998 PDB summarized reports that bin Laden was planning attacks inside the United States, including possible attacks in Washington. The sources were considered highly questionable, but the possibility of a homeland attack had reached the president.
After the East Africa embassy bombings the following month, the reporting continued. An August 28 PDB said bin Laden’s network remained intact and that he was considering attacks in the United States. On September 1 came UBL’s Infrastructure in North America. Three days later, another PDB reported that bin Laden had associates inside the country.
None of those reports, by itself, predicted September 11. But by the fall of 1998, the reporting was repeatedly raising a different problem than the one Washington had spent years confronting overseas. Bin Laden was not only threatening Americans abroad. Intelligence increasingly pointed toward the homeland. That should have changed how later reporting was viewed.
The Aircraft Was Already In The Reporting
A September 10, 1998 PDB, UBL’s Location and Intentions, reported that bin Laden’s preferred option was to strike the United States on its own soil in Washington. It also contained one of the most significant pieces of intelligence in the files: a walk-in source claimed the group responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa might fly an explosive-packed airplane into an American city.
The assessment cautioned that there was no conclusive information about bin Laden’s future plans. That caveat was appropriate. The reporting did not prove such an operation existed, but it gave analysts a scenario serious enough to test.
The 9/11 Commission later found that the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center did not analyze how a hijacked or explosives-laden aircraft might be used as a weapon. It did not develop indicators for that type of attack, and the intelligence community did not establish collection requirements to look for them. The Commission noted that such analysis could have identified one of the terrorists’ critical operational requirements: finding suicide operatives capable of flying large jet aircraft.
That is where this becomes more than a missed warning. Intelligence does not always tell you exactly what the enemy will do. Sometimes it gives you enough to start working backward from the operation. If al-Qaeda wanted to use an aircraft as a weapon, it would need people who could fly. Those people would need training. They would need access to the United States and its aviation system. The plotters would need to understand airport security and might test it beforehand. Once you identify those requirements, they become things you can look for.
Three months later, more pieces appeared. A December 4, 1998 PDB, Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks, described preparations for attacks inside the U.S. A senior bin Laden operative was expected to meet with counterparts in the U.S. to discuss options, while reporting described plans that could include hijacking an American airliner. Two members of an operational team had apparently evaded security checks during a trial run at an unidentified New York airport. Members of bin Laden’s network had also received hijacking training.
That was significant reporting: hijacking training, U.S. counterparts and an airport security trial run. Yet the expected purpose of the hijacking remained familiar. The aircraft would be seized to secure the release of imprisoned extremists, including the Blind Sheikh.
That assumption mattered. Al-Qaeda did not have to invent hijacking. It only had to change what hijacking was for. The possibility that the airplane itself could be the weapon had already entered presidential intelligence, but it did not become the framework against which later reporting was tested.
The Assumption That Failed
By 2001, the reporting around bin Laden had grown substantially. The August 6 PDB, Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US, is now one of the best-known intelligence documents associated with 9/11. Read alongside the files released this week, it looks less like an isolated warning and more like the culmination of a threat stream that had been building for years.
The brief said bin Laden’s followers had been told to “bring the fighting to America.” It reported that al-Qaeda members had lived in or traveled to the U.S. for years and that the organization apparently maintained a support structure that could aid attacks. It also cited FBI information showing suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other attacks, while noting that the FBI was conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considered bin Laden-related.
It was the 36th PDB item that year relating to bin Laden or al-Qaeda, but the first devoted specifically to the possibility of an attack inside the U.S. Five weeks remained before 9/11. The brief also noted that earlier reporting about a possible hijacking had not been corroborated. That caution was warranted, but by then new information was pointing again to possible hijacking preparations. At that point, the older reporting should have been reconsidered in light of the new threat picture.
If the 1998 reporting was wrong about why al-Qaeda wanted an airplane, that did not necessarily mean it was wrong about al-Qaeda’s interest in aircraft. Those are different intelligence questions. New information can change the significance of reporting that once looked weak or incomplete.
Another August 2001 PDB noted that bin Laden’s operational practices had become “expert and flexible.” That phrase deserves more attention. An enemy that is expert and flexible learns. Al-Qaeda had already demonstrated that it could spend years preparing an operation, adjust after setbacks, and give operatives flexibility in how attacks were carried out.
Bojinka is a good example. The 1995 plot to bomb U.S. airliners over the Pacific unraveled, but the idea did not disappear with it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had already been thinking about using aircraft as weapons while working on the plot, and he later carried that concept into the operation that became 9/11.
That is why you cannot hunt that kind of network by asking only what it did last time. You have to ask what it learned from failure, what it kept, what it discarded, and what it might do differently the next time. That was the larger analytic problem. The United States recognized al-Qaeda as a dangerous terrorist organization, but it had not fully adjusted to an adversary that was studying American systems, identifying vulnerabilities and adapting familiar tactics to exploit them.
What September 12 Made Clear
A PDB prepared hours after the attacks described mounting evidence that extremists in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf knew bin Laden-directed attacks were imminent. Extremists reportedly knew a probable operation existed. Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar had also reportedly clashed over bin Laden’s determination to carry out attacks, and bin Laden told Omar that he had operations underway that would cause great damage to the United States.
After the attack, those pieces fit together in a way they had not before. That is why describing 9/11 simply as a failure to warn does not go far enough. America was warned. The deeper failure was understanding the adversary well enough to recognize what those warnings could mean before the operation was complete.
That is what makes these files worth studying beyond another round of anniversary headlines. The United States knew bin Laden wanted to strike America. It knew al-Qaeda could plan operations over years. It had reporting on operatives inside the country, hijacking training, airport security testing, and even the possibility of an airplane being flown into an American city. No single report predicted September 11, but together they described an enemy adapting faster than our assumptions.
That is the lesson worth carrying forward. Intelligence collection gives you pieces of the picture, but collection alone is not enough. Analysis has to determine what those pieces mean, and targeting has to ask what the adversary must do next for an operation to succeed. Before September 11, the U.S. had important pieces of that picture. It did not connect them in time. That was the gap the hijackers flew through.

Osama Bin Laden

The 9/11 Files Show America Heard The Warning And Missed The War

9/11 commission

al qaeda

osama bin laden

september 11 attacks

Twenty-five years after 9/11, a quarter-century after Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, here is where we currently stand: The mayor of New York is an Islamic terrorist sympathizer. So is the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. So are congresspeople from New York to Michigan to Minnesota.
The West has imported millions of immigrants from Muslim countries, a huge swath of whom do not support Western values. The West has continued to excuse and appease Islamic radicalism across the globe, with some rare exceptions. Many Americans, nearly the entire Left along with the horseshoe Right, now agree with the anti-American worldview promoted by Osama bin Laden that the United States and the West are chiefly responsible for suffering around the world, and that Islamic terrorism is simply blowback for Western sin.
Let’s start with a history lesson, a lesson in memory. There are a lot of people listening to my show and walking around the United States who weren&#8217;t alive for 9/11.
You have to be about 30 or older to remember 9/11. For a lot of folks, this is the first time they&#8217;re even experiencing what history was.
That&#8217;s just a reality. As time moves on, things become more distant.
But for an entire generation of people, for several generations of people, this was the worst moment in American history. What ought we remember on the 25th anniversary of 9/11?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2505?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Of course, we should remember the pain Americans suffered and still suffer.
When we remember, it is not enough to be vague about that day, but that seems to be the purposeful tendency: to be vague.
Who did it and what did they think? If you listen to our politicians, they have no idea. It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. It&#8217;s just a bad thing that happened, and we have no idea why or how it happened, or what the people who did it thought, or what people who still agree with them today think.
Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York — a man who once rapped in solidarity with the Holy Land Five, the people who went to jail for material support of terrorism via the Holy Land Foundation — has nothing but sympathy for a wide variety of Islamic radicals.
He issued this statement:
<blockquote>We remember 9/11 as the darkest day in our city&#8217;s history, but we also remember what so many New Yorkers did in that darkness. We remember the thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers who lined up for hours to donate blood. We remember the people who opened their homes to those who could not get home. We remember the workers who carried their colleagues down hundreds of stairs, then turned around and went back up to find someone else who needed help. 
25 years later, we have a sacred obligation to those who were stolen from us to care for one another as they cared for strangers, to live lives worthy of the sacrifices they made, and to build a city worthy of their courage. A city where we run toward one another. That is how we remember.</blockquote>
Everything that Mamdani is saying here would be equally applicable if the towers had simply collapsed on their own.
If you were just watching this, if you didn&#8217;t know anything about it, if you were a young person who didn&#8217;t live through 9/11, if you were an alien who landed on planet Earth today, you would have no idea who did what and to whom.
There is a purposeful attempt to obscure what happened on 9/11, who did it, and why they did it.
The top of The New York Times web page had the following three headlines. Headline number one: “25 years after 9/11, a nation gathers to remember and to mourn the lives lost.”
Headline number two: “Trump personifies a nation moving on.”
Headline number three: “Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers.” There was also this headline from The New York Times: “Facing Islamophobia. Mamdani keeps focus on 9/11 victims.”
Never mind that many of the 9/11 victims don&#8217;t want him around. They certainly don&#8217;t want him attending their events.
This is worse than useless. It is counterproductive. It is a total betrayal of the American people and the victims of 9/11 and their families and all the people who fought to defend America in the aftermath. We have to remember and relive the evil that happened on 9/11, because if we don&#8217;t, what we forget is the nature of our enemies, who are still out there and still doing things and still think the same things.
On 9/11, 2,977 Americans were murdered while two American airplanes were hijacked and flown directly into the World Trade Center. Flight 11 was the first flight that hit; it hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. There were 87 passengers on board, including the crew. Everyone was killed instantly. Every stairwell route above floor 91 was severed. No one could escape if you were above that floor.
There are many, many, many tapes of people who were located in the towers who were calling their families to tell them they loved them because they knew they would never come home to them. 
Firefighters immediately started rushing the buildings, trying to get people out. Hundreds of firefighters were killed on 9/11.
The second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The 60 passengers who were on board, including the crew, were instantly killed.
People on the street tried to dodge the debris as it began raining down from the towers.
The footage is astonishing. Much of this footage wasn&#8217;t made publicly available for years because there was essentially a conspiracy of silence to keep these images from becoming ingrained in an entire generation of Americans beyond the basics. Why?
Because Americans might respond terribly.
People began leaning out of the towers, trying to breathe, trying to survive, if they were above the stories that had been hit. They had nowhere to go. At least 37 people, probably well over 50, ended up jumping to their deaths from the North Towers because people were trapped in the heat.
It is important to recognize what America&#8217;s enemies are willing to do. This is what they celebrated. People were dancing in the streets in certain places on planet Earth.
There was a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, that hit the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. The 59 passengers and crew were killed instantly. One hundred and twenty-five military and civilian personnel died inside the building as well. It was like a missile hitting the Pentagon.
There was the horrifying sight of the South Tower collapsing at 9:59 a.m., with somewhere between 600 and 1,000 people dying inside the South Tower, including 343 New York City Fire Department firefighters and 71 law enforcement officers.
Meanwhile, one of the great stories of heroism in American history was taking place aboard United Airlines Flight 93. That flight to the fourth plane had been hijacked. It was likely headed for the Capitol building, and the passengers breached the cockpit and counterattacked the hijackers, forcing the plane to crash. All 40 of the passengers and crew died.
In an iconic moment in American history, passenger Todd Beamer told the others, “Are you guys ready? Let&#8217;s roll.” That became a battle cry for Americans.
The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. One thousand six hundred people died inside the North Tower. Everyone above the impact zone died.
Most of midtown Manhattan was a war zone. Lower Manhattan was a war zone.
The 9/11 Commission released its full report in July 2004. Of course, conspiracy theorists will claim the report was rigged from the start and other nonsense. But the reality is that the commission produced an incredibly thorough report. 
The report summarized institutional breakdowns before 9/11 and the failures of intelligence to communicate with one another. The commission reviewed some 2.5 million pages of documents and interviewed 1,200 individuals.
The chief failure was the failure of imagination. People just did not think that Islamic terrorists could carry off anything of this size and scale. Terrorism was not regarded as a paramount national security concern before 9/11. Counterterrorism was treated as a law enforcement issue rather than as a foreign policy and intelligence issue. Our intelligence agencies failed. The FBI was more reactive than proactive. The CIA had been weakened.
A Chinese firewall separated the CIA and the FBI, so they could not share information. The FAA had a no-fly watch list with a total of 12 people; none of the hijackers were on it.
Al-Qaeda, which carried out the attacks, obviously had a strategy in the lead-up to 9/11. Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda in 1998, declared it a religious duty for Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world, both military and civilian, and Al-Qaeda built a network of state sanctuaries during the 1990s in Sudan and in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
We know why Osama bin Laden did this. It is not a mystery. The answer is that Osama bin Laden was a terrorist devotee of Islam. This does not mean that all Muslims are terrorists or that all Muslims agreed with Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden wrote a letter to America in 2002, and you can break it down into two parts: the excuse-making and the real reason. The excuse-making is about how Muslims everywhere are victims of America.
That’s nonsense. It&#8217;s not true. It is factually untrue. It is a victim mentality, unsupported by the evidence.
The real reason Osama bin Laden did this is that he was a Muslim fundamentalist who believed that everyone in the world ought to convert to Islam.
He knew the West lacked the courage to stand up and say we have a civilization worth preserving and defending. He believed we would tire and become stupid. That was his premise.
Our enemies thought we were weak. They thought that we would blind ourselves to reality.
As it turns out over the subsequent 25 years, they were not wrong. Just days after 9/11, the president of the United States appeared at the Islamic Center of Washington to explain that Islam was a religion of peace.
By saying this and many things like it, President Bush essentially defanged the entire Western movement against our actual enemies. That doesn&#8217;t mean every Muslim is an enemy of the United States, but if you want to make the argument that our enemies hate American freedom, you need to explain why they hated American freedom and what motivated them.
President Bush believed the false idea that all human beings around the world believe the same kinds of things, and that we are all, at root, exactly the same in our orientation toward the world.
This is untrue. Not every human being on Earth is oriented toward freedom the way Westerners believe in it.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali noted in <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mohamed-atta-25-years-911">Tablet</a>: 
<blockquote>Islam is not an “Abrahamic faith” that functions anything like Protestant Christianity or rabbinic Judaism. There is no equivalent in Islamic doctrine for such foundational Western concepts as the separation of church and state, secular law, or the idea of individual freedoms and rights, including the freedom to worship freely. Rather, Islam is animated by the beliefs that the Muslim world suffered a historical dispossession with the abolition of the caliphate and that this loss must eventually be reversed, including the retaking of all lands that have ever been ruled by Muslims. In the temporal sphere, Islam as much resembles totalizing and irredentist political ideologies as it does a religion.
In the frame in which both ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed political spokesmen see the world, America and the wider West are not just geopolitical rivals. They are civilizational obstacles: powers that uphold a secular, liberal, and postcaliphal order that Islamists seek to overcome. </blockquote>
Americans have been lied to. We&#8217;ve been taught the opposite of this for a generation.
When you refuse to acknowledge the reality of Islam&#8217;s role in geopolitics, people are left to speculate about the motives behind acts like 9/11, and then they glom on to precisely the worldview that Osama bin Laden was counting on: The idea that if only the U.S. and the West weren&#8217;t so mean and cruel and interventionist, there&#8217;d be no problems and 9/11 never would have happened.
The belief system held by a huge percentage of Muslims across planet Earth — and a heavy percentage in the West as well — is not conciliatory with basic ideas of the West such as separation of church and state and freedom of religion.
That does not mean that there aren&#8217;t Muslims who don&#8217;t support terrorism; it does not mean that there aren&#8217;t some moderate or reform Muslims out there. There are some, and I truly hope they win.
But if we refuse to acknowledge who did 9/11, why they did it, and what the overall problem is, we will import it.
And it will be our fault.

Firefighters Look Though Debris At Ground Zero

The 9/11 Lesson America Can’t Afford To Forget

islamic terrorism

islamophobia

opinion

zohran mamdani

Three years before the September 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. intelligence warned President Bill Clinton’s administration that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda could attempt to attack an American city with an “explosive-laden plane.” 
That portentous warning is contained in a newly declassified intelligence report released Friday by the CIA as part of the agency’s largest-ever public release of analysis related to the 9/11 attacks.
<a href="https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/cia-releases-presidents-daily-briefs-in-commemoration-of-the-25th-anniversary-of-9-11/">The CIA released 71 President’s Daily Briefs</a>, files covering the period from February 1998 through September 12, 2001, giving the public an unprecedented look at what intelligence officials were telling presidents about bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the years leading up to the attacks.
The documents include a September 10, 1998, report titled “Bin Laden’s Location and Intentions,” which warned that al-Qaeda “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city.” The intelligence did not know the precise details of the eventual September 11 plot, including the targets, timing, or use of multiple hijacked commercial aircraft, but the newly public documents show that American intelligence agencies had repeatedly warned successive administrations that bin Laden was seeking to strike the United States.
The 1998 warning was one of a series of reports that now appear particularly significant in hindsight. A July 1998 report told President Clinton that reports from several sources indicating bin Laden intended to attack the United States were “plausible,” while a 1999 assessment examined whether the large number of potential al-Qaeda targets being reported could have represented an intentional deception campaign.
By October 2000, another intelligence report stated that bin Laden was “committed to striking U.S. targets,” while noting that the CIA could not pinpoint the targets or timing.
And just over a month before the attacks, July 24, 2001, one such report told President George W. Bush that an “expected imminent bin Laden-sponsored terrorist operation” had been postponed, while warning that preparations for other attacks could still be underway.
The documents also include the now-famous August 6, 2001, presidential briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” which had previously been released and warned that bin Laden had been preparing operations against the United States for years. The newly released material provides additional context for that warning and shows that it was part of a much longer series of intelligence assessments about al-Qaeda.
The CIA said the documents demonstrate the difficulty intelligence officials faced in distinguishing meaningful warnings from incomplete, contradictory, and sometimes unreliable information.
Before 9/11, counterterrorism was not yet the dominant intelligence priority it would become after the attacks. CIA analysts had information indicating that bin Laden wanted to attack the United States, but they often lacked specific details about the location and timing of an attack.
The agency also faced concerns about “warning fatigue,” with officials worried about repeatedly alerting policymakers to potential attacks without enough concrete information to explain how the threats could be stopped.
The 9/11 Commission ultimately concluded that American intelligence agencies had provided numerous warnings about al-Qaeda but failed to understand the scale and immediacy of the threat. The commission described the failure in part as one of “imagination,” alongside problems involving intelligence collection, information sharing, and the government’s response to the warnings. The newly declassified documents do not fundamentally alter that conclusion.
The CIA said the release contains more than 100 pages of analysis that are now publicly available for the first time. “Today, [CIA] Director John Ratcliffe declassified 71 President’s Daily Brief products in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks,” the agency said. The agency described the release as its “single largest release of declassified CIA PDB products related to 9/11.”
“Twenty-five years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our Nation, but they did not break us,” Ratcliffe wrote in the release. “Generations of CIA officers have since dedicated their careers to securing justice for our fallen Americans and ensuring al-Qaida would never again harm our country.” Ratcliffe also said the release was intended to honor both the Americans killed in the attacks and CIA officers who later died during the war against terrorism.
The President’s Daily Brief is among the most sensitive intelligence products produced for the White House. It provides the president and a limited number of senior officials with intelligence analysis concerning threats and other national-security matters.

Untitled design (15)

CIA Releases Never-Before-Seen Intelligence On 9/11 Terror Attacks

john ratcliffe

The first thing that always comes up when talking about September 11, 2001, is: Where were you when you heard the news?
It was a weird day for me. A 16-year-old sophomore, I was out of school that morning. Having suffered massive injuries from a snow skiing accident in April of 2001, I was driving to Springfield, Illinois, on Interstate 72 to visit a surgeon for a follow-up appointment with my mother.
The morning really was as beautiful as everyone describes — an uncannily early-fall day with crisp temperatures and not a cloud in the sky. That everyone remarks on the beauty of the day in retelling the events of 9/11, I think, is a subliminal way that the human mind interprets beauty against the carnage of brutality and sadness. We find categories of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, as backgrounds for making sense of our moral memories. That day, odd as it may be, we used the weather to help frame the mind’s memory of 9/11. These moral timestamps have a quiet, imperceptible way of searing images into our brains, and the beauty of that day’s beginning is offset by the ugliness of carnage and ashes that would mark the day’s end.
I’ll never forget the breaking news alert from our local radio station, WLDS, announcing that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Like everyone else, I believed it was just a one-off mistake. Who, after all, would do such a thing purposefully? Between arriving at the doctor’s office and the appointment, we got news that another plane had struck the other tower. I’ll never forget, paradoxically, the felt, audible silence that fell over the waiting room as everyone was processing that the invincible fortress that is, and was, the United States, was under attack.
After we got back to school late that morning, televisions were set up in a common area where students and faculty alike watched the carnage and disbelief in real time. Against all odds, and something that never happened before or after that day, at lunchtime, our principal began to yell for everyone to exit the cafeteria and flee to the parking lot. At the moment, what immediately came to mind was that the terrorism of New York was going nationwide, so widespread that students in central Illinois, of all places, were now potential victims. It turned out that an electric breaker caught fire, triggering a fire alarm and the fire department’s arrival. You can imagine the sense of anxiety that fell on us as we had no idea what was happening at the time.
They canceled school for the rest of the day, and my then-girlfriend (and now wife) and I went to my house to watch the news. I’ll never forget returning her home later that afternoon. The thoughts that swept over me were visceral — I genuinely felt that at age 16, we had had my generation’s Pearl Harbor moment. It was as though the world had changed (and it had) and that my generation, emerging millennials, would be called to action around the world (and they were). Several of my friends from high school would serve in the War on Terror, in Iraq and Afghanistan. They would not come back the same. What immediately came to mind was a call to arms. It dawned on me with real sadness that, had America declared war, my injuries would have kept me from serving. It now makes sense to me, reading the stories of young men in World War II who could not serve because of medical disability and who felt shame the rest of their lives for not doing their part. In retrospect, what seems bizarre is how compartmentalized the war became — especially for those of us who did not fight (or could not fight, as in my case). The war could be kept out of mind and out of sight if you let it, but all the while, we knew there were young men fighting and dying in far-away lands. I say this with embarrassment. As a patriotic American, what feels like shirking responsibility and letting someone else carry the burdens of protecting the nation is a mental frame not to be forgotten. It was as if American culture went on while a generation of men spilled blood in a war that Americans grew accustomed to, given its length and protracted nature.
But this essay is not about me. Even if this psychological retelling helps historians understand what my generation processed that day, it gains renewed importance as I now teach students who were either too young to remember 9/11 or who were not yet born.
9/11 was many things. It was a display of humanity at its worst and at its best. It was a display of Islamist barbarians drunk on the power of false religion, and fueled by evil, retribution, and hate — a hate that would pour down destruction in the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans. It was a display of American altruism at its best, too—the firefighters who selflessly stormed upward in burning towers to save trapped victims, only to become victims themselves. The story of 9/11 is about Americans who formed long lines outside hospitals and blood banks waiting to donate to their fellow Americans. It was the raucous patriotism of Americans who pled for justice. It was George W. Bush standing on rubble, declaring to a watching world that the terrorists would pay — and they did. The killing of Osama bin Laden at the hands of Navy SEALS in 2011 was an epic, unforgettable coda to a decade of tumult. Biblical justice rained down on bin Laden (Rom. 13:1-7), a man whose infamy ended with his corpse sunk to the ocean depths. It was like a World Series game: the President, in a deafening crowd of applauding spectators (many of whom probably did not vote for him as New Yorkers), throwing a pitch down the middle of the plate, creating a memory that signaled—in a mysterious way that only America’s love affair with baseball could do—resolve and solidarity.
But today, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, as a theologian and ethicist, I now look back at that day as a test of the regnant secularism that our society was gambling its existence on. I evaluate that day by what the moral plates underneath American society revealed. In the early 2000s, America was more Christian than it is today, at least statistically. But the secularization thesis scholars heralded was well underway by then. But amid all of our progress, our enlightenment, and our belief that secularism affords us the moral categories to make sense of moral tragedy, 9/11 proved the impotence of secularism. When the Twin Towers fell, no one went looking to an atheist manifesto to understand what had just happened. No one pulled Nietzsche from their shelves — they chose Psalm 23 instead. Scholars may make academic and transgressive arguments about moral relativism, but on 9/11, rest assured, no one wondered what the neighborhood atheist thought. The famed atheist Christopher Hitchens’ worldview could not satisfy the longings for justice, but Billy Graham’s could. Secularism was exposed as fleeting and intellectual, divorced from the needs of objectivity, affection, and explanation. Moral realism — the idea that morality is real, objective, and felt within the inner recesses of our souls — was the currency of grief-stricken Americans that fateful day. Americans did not soothe their fears with strip clubs, Wiccan manifestos, or sports stadiums to quench their existential wonderings. Out of 9/11, we think of the Americans who returned to churches in dramatic numbers in the weeks that followed. We think of the answers sought against the horizons of loss, longing, and assuagement.
Like all tragedies that befall human civilization, we go back to the moral categories we’re told that secularism moved us on from. From the Nuremberg Trials that sought justice for the atrocity of the Holocaust to the palpable angst of the 1960s that oversaw a cultural revolution, moral convulsions have a way of jarring us awake from our moral slumbers. When events unfold with such heinous evil on open display, the ambient moral assumptions we’ve grown up on while living in a secular country become questionable. Moral events of such magnitude leave us crying out for a form of justice that no human court of law can finally deliver upon. Can political justice really rectify the wrongs of that day? It can, in the temporal sense. But in a final sense, a guilty verdict cannot bring back a deceased son or daughter, but the Lord Jesus, who calls himself “the resurrection and life,” most certainly can if we repent of our sins and follow Him (John 11:25-26). September 11, 2001 reminds us that “law written on the heart” (Rom. 2:15) is a law etched on it from its Creator, and that we must reach for a Higher Court, a divine court, to assuage the anguish of human grief—to believe that in the divine ledger of eternity, evil will truly be answered for with perfect justice.
I am now 41. As a proud American, I measure my early adolescence and early middle age against the realities of what happened twenty-five years ago. I was 16 when America was attacked, and until 2021, when then-President Joe Biden unceremoniously (though not unjustifiably) withdrew our forces from Afghanistan, the largest chunk of my life has been lived in the afterglow of what I hear soldiers refer to as “GWOT”—the Global War on Terror, a war sparked by what occurred on that beautiful-and-macabre September day. What occurred on 9/11 is a testament to the reality of evil, the valor of fallen heroes, and the promise that no matter how secular the modern West may think itself to be, God has placed not only eternity on our hearts, but the cry for justice, too.
***
Andrew T. Walker, Ph.D., is Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology. He is a Fellow with The Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. You can follow him on X: @AndrewTWalker.

Prayers for World Trade Center Victims

September 11 And The Impotence Of Secularism

christianity

secularism

war on terror

A Texan’s time on the run came to an end this month when the FBI <a href="https://x.com/FBIDallas/status/2077037975007826390">extradited</a> him from Qatar to the United States. FBI Dallas coordinated with Qatari authorities to apprehend the suspect, a 28-year-old man allegedly involved in a sweeping money laundering network who has evaded justice since 2021. The story is an example of what the U.S.-Qatar partnership can achieve when it’s working as it should. However, the success does more to accentuate the partnership’s shortcomings than add a notch in its belt.
In August 2021, federal authorities <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-edtx/pr/101-indicted-transnational-cell-phone-trafficking-conspiracy">charged</a> 101 individuals allegedly involved in a “cell phone trafficking conspiracy” dubbed “Operation Cash Out.” A superseding indictment claimed that the suspects were part of a “multi-layered criminal organization” that sold nearly $100 million of stolen electronics to foreign import companies. One of the suspects, Abdullah Anwar, fled to Pakistan while awaiting trial. Eventually, he made his way to Qatar, where he landed in cuffs. Now in the United States, Anwar is <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-edtx/pr/dallas-county-man-has-been-extradited-qatar-united-states-face-charges-eastern?utm_source=chatgpt.com">facing charges</a> of “conspiracy to transport stolen property, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.”
Fugitives have sought refuge in Qatar for decades. Some have lived there openly. However, Anwar is one of the few publicly acknowledged extradition cases. The U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with Qatar. But given the strength of the bilateral partnership and the high-profile offenders who seek refuge in Qatar, the relatively low arrest rate is surprising.
In 1996, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/08/world/threats-responses-counterterrorism-qaeda-aide-slipped-away-long-before-sept-11.html">wrote</a> to Qatar’s foreign minister that he had “received disturbing information suggesting that” al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) had “again escaped the surveillance of your Security Services and that he appears to be aware of F.B.I. interest in him.” KSM had been living freely in Qatar, earning a government salary at the Ministry of Electricity and Water while plotting terrorist attacks. The FBI nearly nabbed him in 1996, but Qatari officials <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/08/world/threats-responses-counterterrorism-qaeda-aide-slipped-away-long-before-sept-11.html">reportedly </a>“tipped him off,” and he <a href="https://9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf">fled</a> to Pakistan before <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/hunting-barren-hills-133075">linking</a> up with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Thirty years later, the episode is apparently water under the bridge. FBI Director Kash Patel <a href="https://x.com/MOI_QatarEn/status/1998388797973712919">signed</a> two Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) with Qatar’s Ministry of Interior while in Doha in December 2025. The MoUs <a href="https://x.com/USEmbassyDoha/status/1998739396581879982">reflected</a> a “shared commitment to public safety and counterterrorism cooperation,” according to the U.S. Embassy in Qatar.
Law enforcement cooperation is occurring at the state level too. Former New York City Police Commissioner Edward Caban visited Qatar twice in 2023 for meetings and to “observe and collaborate regarding security practices.” The Qatari government <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/08/01/us-news/qatar-paid-for-nypd-commissioners-middle-east-trips-after-adams-admin-was-mum-on-who-picked-up-tab/">reportedly</a> paid for both junkets. The next year, a delegation from Qatar’s Police Academy <a href="https://www.gulf-times.com/article/681699/qatar/police-academy-delegation-visits-us-military-and-police-institutions">visited</a> the New York Police Academy. Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux also <a href="https://www.wfaa.com/article/sports/soccer/world-cup/dallas-police-chief-daniel-comeaux-travels-to-qatar-for-world-cup-security-meetings/287-261db22b-86b2-445e-9bcc-e15b373a8f3d">traveled</a> to Qatar with a group of officers in August 2025 as Texas prepared to host games for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The mutual exchange of expertise would suggest that Qatar’s record has improved since the days of KSM’s escape. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Despite achieving Major Non-NATO Ally status, Qatar has continued to harbor terrorists and provide a haven to their private financiers. In one high-profile case, Doha brokered a prisoner swap that saw the United States free five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for U.S. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The “Taliban 5” resettled in Qatar, where they were monitored by the government. Washington greenlit this arrangement presumably under the belief that Doha would exercise sufficient oversight. However, within a year of the exchange, American officials <a href="https://abcnews.com/Politics/taliban-travel-ban-extended-negotiations/story?id=31433083">told</a> the media that the Taliban 5 had “attempted to make contact with active members of the Taliban while under supervision from the Qataris.”
Hamas also sought shelter in Qatar, over 1,000 miles away from Gaza where the group’s leaders could amass personal <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-live-luxury-lives-in-qatar/">fortunes</a> and incite violence at a safe distance from the bloodshed. While the U.S. government tolerated Hamas’ official presence in Doha, <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-788543">reports</a> suggest that Qatar went so far as to train Hamas officers at its police academy as late as 2023. Hamas’s politburo watched the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel unfold from their offices in Doha. Many of them have since met their maker. Yet at least one senior chief is still kicking: Khaled Meshaal.
Meshal has resided in Qatar since 2012. He served as Hamas’s political chief before <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-elects-former-chief-meshaal-head-diaspora-office-2021-04-12/">becoming</a> the group’s de facto foreign minister in 2021. Former Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid bin Mohammed Al Attiyah once <a href="https://dohanews.co/qatar-fm-hamas-leader-remain-doha-dear-guest/">described</a> Meshaal as a “dear guest of Qatar,” and that sentiment continues. Meshaal appeared on stage at the 2026 Al Jazeera Forum in Doha, where he <a href="https://jewishinsider.com/2026/02/al-jazeera-forum-qatar-hamas-khaled-mashaal/">celebrated</a> the October 7 massacre for having “brought the Palestinian cause back to the forefront of the world.”
Bizarrely, Qatar continues to platform Meshaal despite the fact that he <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-terrorism-charges-against-senior-leaders-hamas">faces</a> terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-terrorism-charges-against-senior-leaders-hamas">charges</a> in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice unsealed those charges in September 2024, but Qatar evidently does not intend to extradite him. Nor has Washington pressed the Qataris to do so. There was a fleeting moment later in 2024 when it seemed Qatar was preparing to expel Hamas at the Biden administration’s <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/08/politics/qatar-hamas-doha-us-request">request</a>. Those reports were either <a href="https://x.com/MofaQatar_EN/status/1855322121989148692">untrue</a> or <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/qatar-denies-expelling-hamas-israel-trump">unrealized</a>, and there’s been little American pressure since. That is inexcusable.
If Anwar’s arrest is any indication, Qatar has the capacity to extradite defendants in cooperation with U.S. authorities. Meshaal’s continued impunity is therefore likely a matter of will rather than ability. There is little reason why Washington shouldn’t demand that Qatar extradite Meshaal and begin to flush the world’s most wanted from its territory. That should be a bare minimum ask from a country that purports to be a friend of the United States.
***
<a href="https://www.fdd.org/team/natalie-ecanow/">Natalie Ecanow</a> is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow Natalie on X <a href="https://x.com/NatalieEcanow">@NatalieEcanow</a>. Follow FDD on X <a href="https://x.com/FDD">@FDD</a>. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on foreign policy and national security

A Day In The Life Of Hamas Leader Khalid Mishal

Why Hasn’t Washington Pressed Qatar To Extradite Terrorists?

Abdullah Anwar

Doha

DW Opinion

kash patel

Khaled Meshal

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)

Khalid bin Mohammed Al Attiyah

qatar

A man who has referred to himself as &#8220;Osama bin Laden&#8221; and &#8220;Timothy McVeigh&#8221; is now facing criminal charges after allegedly threatening to kill federal immigration officers and sexually assault their wives.
John Paul Cupp, of Portland, is a &#8220;prolific producer&#8221; of content involving &#8220;aggressive rhetoric, calls for war against the United States, antisemitic threats, and threats of violence&#8221; who has zeroed in on Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel and their families, <a href="https://x.com/FBIPortland/status/1993098469972525178" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according</a> to the FBI. His latest alleged calls for violence come as federal immigration agents face an 8,000% increase in death threats, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Cupp also told authorities &#8220;that he was Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh,&#8221; according to the FBI <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/955228492/FBI-affidavit-John-Cupp#content=query:osama,pageNum:8,indexOnPage:0,bestMatch:false">affidavit</a>.
“Our ICE law enforcement officers face an 8,000% increase in death threats against them while they risk their lives every single day to remove the worst of the worst including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, terrorists, and gang members,&#8221; Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement shared with The Daily Wire.
&#8220;From bounties placed on their heads for their murders, threats to their families, stalking, and doxxing online, our officers are experiencing an unprecedented level of violence and threats against them and their families. Secretary Noem has been clear: if you threaten or lay a hand on law enforcement, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,&#8221; she said.
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Cupp was first spotted yelling at officers approaching a crowd in October, according to the Department of Justice. The 45-year-old posted a video the next month, repeating his earlier threats, and continued posting them online days later.
Some threats lodged against ICE have tragically materialized. In September, a shooter <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/second-illegal-immigrant-detainee-dies-after-dallas-ice-shooting">opened fire</a> on an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees as he tried to aim at federal agents.
A group of accused Antifa terrorists allegedly lured agents out of an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, by setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July before opening fire on them. One police officer was shot in the neck during the attack.

Untitled design – 2025-12-01T143136.366

Portland Radical Accused Of Threatening To Kill ICE Agents, Sexually Assault Their Wives

Portland Rioter 'Osama Bin Laden' Accused Of Threatening To Kill ICE Agents, Sexually Assault Their 

antifa

antisemitism

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Portland

radical

Timothy McVeigh

A single moment in time can define the future and impact lives in ways beyond the comprehension of many Americans. For the crew and families who suffered the unimaginable loss of their Sailor, that moment in time came at 11:18 a.m. on October 12, 2000. Those of us who directly experienced that brutal Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on our ship, that moment in time loops back to play over and over in our minds. Now, each of us who was there, along with many in the Navy and the nation, will pause to reflect on the past 25 years of how that moment affected our lives. We live with the crystal-clear memory of those who chose to serve our nation and died for our freedom. Their sacrifice remains paramount in our thoughts and prayers.
USS Cole spent a year training for deployment to the Mediterranean and the Middle East with a clearly defined mission — safeguard U.S. national security through presence operations and maritime interdiction of illicit vessels smuggling oil out of Iraq. The crew was really good, but I knew I could demand better of them and was relentless in achieving more. Ultimately, our standards of performance and training were higher than any ship on the Norfolk waterfront.
Sure, there was the typical Sailor grumbling and complaining that we were spending too much time doing drills and learning watch and combat positions beyond their normal duty requirements. Little did we know that the investment in ourselves would save a $1 billion warship and most of the wounded crew.
On August 8, 2000, with families and friends tearfully waving goodbye, the ship slowly maneuvered off the pier and began a voyage into the annals of history. That day, a new benchmark of performance was set in the U.S. Navy — USS Cole got underway with a 100% qualified all-enlisted crew manning every sea and anchor detail watch position. It was an incredible achievement, never done before and never repeated since. More importantly, that accomplishment left an indelible mark on a crew, now absolutely confident they were well prepared for anything that might come their way, including combat.
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Following port visits in Spain, France, Malta, and Slovenia, we transited the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to enter the Port of Aden, Yemen, for an expected 6-8-hour brief stop for fuel. Three garbage barges were contracted to remove trash. After the first two barges departed, a third boat that looked exactly like the previous two garbage barges approached and came alongside amidship. We had no intelligence, warnings, or indications that this boat was actually manned by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers and packed with explosives built into the hull as a waterborne improvised explosive device.
Suddenly, that singular moment in time occurred. At 25,000 feet per second, the blast shock wave pierced the hull, rapidly expanding as a powerful ball of flame into the interior of the ship. In a split second, metal was rendered unrecognizable, bodies were crushed and mangled, burned by the explosion’s wall of flame. In that instant, heroes stepped in to save lives that were forever changed, and within hours, families would be notified of the worst news possible — their loved one had been killed in the service of our country.
<div id="attachment_987153" style="width: 778px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-987153" class="size-large wp-image-987153" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1159689-768x576.jpg" alt="380160 02: (FILE PHOTO) A gaping hole mars the port sidee sustained by the Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Cole after a terrorist bomb exploded and killed at least five people and injured 36 during a refueling operation October 12, 2000 in the port of Aden, Yemen. October 12, 2001, marks the one year anniversary of the attack on the USS Cole. (Photo Courtesy of U.S. Navy/Getty Images)" width="768" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1159689-768x576.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1159689-300x225.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1159689.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" />Courtesy of U.S. Navy/Getty Images</div>
Training paid off within an hour as the crew valiantly stabilized the ship, preventing it from sinking and becoming a war trophy for Al-Qaeda. That first day, the crew evacuated 33 wounded off the ship within 99 minutes after the explosion. Ultimately, 32 would survive. While on our own in the immediate aftermath, we were never alone. France deployed a lifesaving medical team, flying 11 wounded to advanced medical facilities in Djibouti. That evening, staff from the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain arrived to arrange for security and get food and water out to the ship. The next morning, the British arrived with a security and damage control team from the HMS Marlborough. Later that day, two U.S. Navy ships, USS Donald Cook and USS Hawes, arrived to provide help and logistics support.
For the next 17 days, the Sailors of USS Cole exhibited initiative and ingenuity as they continually braved equipment failures, system challenges, and, at one point, the loss of our only operating generator on Sunday morning after the attack. The ship began to sink. God love Sailor ingenuity. By late morning, we had cut a hole in the side of the ship near the waterline to pump out floodwater as we feverishly worked to refill our high-pressure air tanks to restart the generator. After a harrowing 22 hours, the generator was started, and USS Cole was saved, again.
<div id="attachment_987149" style="width: 854px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-987149" class="size-large wp-image-987149" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1303030-844x576.jpg" alt="380441 07: U.S. President Bill Clinton speaks during a memorial service for the sailors of the USS Cole October 18, 2000 in Norfolk VA. Clinton attended the service to honored the wounded and dead from the U.S. navy destroyer that was bombed while on a refueling stop in the Yemeni port of Aden. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Newsmakers)" width="844" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1303030-844x576.jpg 844w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1303030-300x205.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1303030-768x524.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/GettyImages-1303030.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 844px) 100vw, 844px" />Mark Wilson/Newsmakers</div>
Finally, after proudly sailing out of Aden harbor blasting our national anthem and Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” over the loudspeakers, USS Cole was floated onto the heavy lift ship, M/V Blue Marlin, and brought back to the United States for repairs. As a testament to the bravery and tenacity of that crew, USS Cole still proudly serves our nation today. This past Christmas Eve, she returned from deployment after shooting down Houthi anti-ship missiles in the Red Sea and successfully engaging Iranian ballistic missiles being fired into Israel. USS Cole remains in the fight to defend freedom.
As with any single moment in time that can shatter or change lives, the attack on USS Cole should serve as a poignant reminder that our freedom is not free. Twenty-five years ago, the courage of a crew was tested in combat, and the results speak for themselves. As a nation, we remain blessed with those who choose to raise their right hand, swear an oath to defend our Constitution and protect our freedom at the cost of their lives. Today, I could not be prouder of my crew and their accomplishments — they are the true heroes who saved USS Cole and their shipmates. Well done!
* * *
Commander Kirk Lippold, USN (Ret.), was the Commanding Officer of the USS Cole when it came under a suicide terrorist attack by al Qaeda in the Port of Aden, Yemen. During his command, he and his crew distinguished themselves by saving the American warship from sinking. This event is widely recognized as one of the most brazen acts of terrorism by al Qaeda prior to September 11, 2001.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/episode-1-the-attack?contentProgram=USS%20COLE%3A%20Al%20Qaeda%E2%80%99s%20Strike%20Before%209%2F11&amp;contentType=ShowEpisode&amp;elementPosition=6&amp;location=Home%20Tab&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Home%20Featured%20Carousel">WATCH: USS Cole: Al-Qaeda’s Strike Before 9/11 on DailyWire+</a></h3>

The Cole Bombing

I Commanded The USS Cole On The Day Al-Qaeda Tried To Sink Her

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A three-star general who has served as the United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence stated that Israel should have sovereignty over the biblical areas of Judea and Samaria.
Retired general William Boykin, who spent 36 years in the U.S. military, including 13 years in Delta Force, the Army’s elite special operations, counter-terrorism unit, is a staunch Christian who <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/college-boots-ex-delta-force-hero-after-complaint-from-lgbt-activists">said</a> as far back as 2016, “I’m going to do everything I can to stop men from going into bathrooms with my daughters, my wife and my granddaughters. I am going to be a very outspoken antagonist on this issue.” President George W. Bush tasked him with hunting down Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Retired Army Major General Robert Scales said of him, &#8220;He commanded Delta and is one of the toughest guys around—but he&#8217;s also one of the nicest, gentlest people I know.&#8221;
Boykin spoke of the necessity of Israel’s sovereignty over Judea and Samaria on Sunday in Samaria, saying, “What we’re doing here is standing on a time bomb that’s going to go off at some point. It already did on the 7th of October,” JNS <a href="https://www.jns.org/former-us-delta-force-commander-backs-judea-samaria-sovereignty/">reported</a>.
“It’s gonna happen again, and that’s why … we need to recognize that if we don’t create a situation where we have sovereignty here, we’re going to see another Oct. 7,” Boykin continued. “There are people who have no knowledge or understanding, and they believe that a 15-mile stretch can be part of your defense—and that is not the case. You and we must stand together and say: We will not accept a two-state solution!”
“After October 7, we must understand—and you of course understand—that Jewish towns and cities here in Judea and Samaria are not just a matter of historical justice. The Jewish communities are Israel’s security belt,” Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan explained.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy, identified 28 Iran-backed terrorist groups and branches in the Biblical areas of Judea and Samaria in Israel, sometimes referred to as the West Bank, where Palestinians have consistently murdered Jews for decades.
“Iran-backed terrorist groups, including, al-Aqsa Martyrs&#8217; Brigades, and Hamas, have proliferated in number and strengthened their presence in the West Bank in recent years,” FDD’s Long War Journal <a href="https://www.longwarjournal.org/westbankterrorgroups" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. “The groups have established battalions (Katibat) in Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and beyond. Iranian arms and funding have primarily fueled this violent escalation. FDD&#8217;s Long War Journal has identified 26 West Bank branches belonging to established terrorist organizations, and two independent armed groups.”
Last December, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) introduced a bill in the Senate to require all official U.S. documents and materials to use the historically accurate term “Judea and Samaria” instead of the “West Bank.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Referring to Judea and Samaria as the ‘West Bank’ is a slap in the face to historical truth.
It’s time to call this region by its rightful name and stop playing into anti-Israel propaganda.<a href="https://t.co/tYwYMZkGMJ">https://t.co/tYwYMZkGMJ</a>
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1864694801217487019?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 5, 2024</a></blockquote>
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The bill, titled the &#8220;Retiring the Egregious Confusion Over the Genuine Name of Israel’s Zone of Influence by Necessitating Government-use of Judea and Samaria (RECOGNIZING Judea and Samaria) Act,&#8221; matched legislation in the House<a href="https://tenney.house.gov/media/press-releases/congresswoman-tenney-introduces-legislation-recognize-rightful-name-judea-and" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> sponsored</a> by Reps. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), Randy Weber (R-TX), and Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY).
“The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria goes back thousands of years. The U.S. should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel,” Cotton stated.
“The Israeli people have an undeniable and indisputable historical and legal claim over Judea and Samaria, and at this critical moment in history, the United States must reaffirm this,”  Tenney echoed. “This bill reaffirms Israel&#8217;s rightful claim to its territory. I remain committed to defending the integrity of the Jewish state and fully supporting Israel&#8217;s sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.”
The term “West Bank” only came into common usage after the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, while &#8220;Samaria&#8221; dates back at least 2,000 years. The great historian Flavius Josephus <a href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/josephus-wara.asp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a>, “Now as to the country of Samaria, it lies between Judea and Galilee.”
Virtually all of the events in the Old Testament occurred in Judea and Samaria; Hebron is considered the burial place of the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and where King David was crowned; Shiloh was where the Tabernacle rested for roughly 370 years; Joseph, who became the Egyptian pharaoh’s right-hand man, is buried in Shechem; Elon Moreh is where the Bible says God promised the Land of Israel to Abraham; and David fought Goliath in the Valley of Elah. These are just some of the Jewish biblical connections to Judea and Samaria.

Gen. William Boykin addresses the crowd during a speech at Colorado Christian University on Monday, May 2, 2011. AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Retired General Who Pursued Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein Wants Israeli Sovereignty Over Judea, Samaria

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London&#8217;s Victoria &amp; Albert Museum took some serious backlash over the weekend after it was reported that an exhibit on British humor had included the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher alongside Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler in a short list of &#8220;contemporary villains.&#8221;
The exhibit, which was meant to show how British humor had evolved over time, showcased Victorian &#8220;Punch &amp; Judy&#8221; puppets along with a caption that included the following:
<blockquote>Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.</blockquote>
Critics were quick to address the issue, with many noting that whatever people thought of Thatcher — Britain&#8217;s first female prime minister — she hardly belonged on a short list of &#8220;villains&#8221; that only included 9/11 architect and al Qaeda terrorist bin Laden and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Nile Gardiner, former aide to Thatcher, argued that the museum should lose access to any government funding over the display. &#8220;The V&amp; A should have its public funding taken away because it&#8217;s engaging here in political activity,&#8221; he said.
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&#39;The V&amp;A should have its public funding taken away because it&#39;s engaging here in political activity.&#39;
Former aide to Margaret Thatcher, Nile Gardiner, reacts to the V&amp;A exhibition listing Margaret Thatcher as a &#39;contemporary villain&#39; alongside Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. <a href="https://t.co/ZEXjmguHIv">pic.twitter.com/ZEXjmguHIv</a>
&mdash; GB News (@GBNEWS) <a href="https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1769854203474669981?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 18, 2024</a></blockquote>
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Deputy leader of Reform UK, Ben Habib, argued that whatever one thought of Thatcher&#8217;s politics, she was an important part of Britain&#8217;s history. He added, &#8220;Whoever made this decision should be sacked.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
&#39;Whoever made this decision should be sacked&#39;.
Deputy leader of Reform UK, Ben Habib, reacts to a V&amp;A exhibition that named Margaret Thatcher, alongside Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden, as a &#39;contemporary villain&#39;. <a href="https://t.co/yjsshZVRLR">pic.twitter.com/yjsshZVRLR</a>
&mdash; GB News (@GBNEWS) <a href="https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1769801552187838807?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 18, 2024</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;It’s staggeringly offensive to bracket Britain’s first female Prime Minister with a genocidal maniac and a terrorist,&#8221; Telegraph associate editor Camilla Tominey <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/16/victoria-albert-museum-margaret-thatcher-exhibition/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a>.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
🖊 &quot;Why does the V&amp;A think Margaret Thatcher is a villain equivalent to Hitler?&quot;
&quot;It’s staggeringly offensive to bracket Britain’s first female Prime Minister with a genocidal maniac and a terrorist&quot;
Read the full column from <a href="https://twitter.com/CamillaTominey?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CamillaTominey</a> below ⬇️ <a href="https://t.co/lsbcPbJ630">https://t.co/lsbcPbJ630</a>
&mdash; The Telegraph (@Telegraph) <a href="https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1768978321189089594?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2024</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Whoever wrote that caption should be called out publicly for being a moron, or perhaps more usefully sent to read a Ladybird book of modern world history. It is sadly symptomatic of the woke, luvvie-dom nonsense that persists in our public institutions,&#8221; Sir Connor Burns, a former trade minister and Conservative MP said. &#8220;They should be given a serious rap across the knuckles and a clarion instruction to grow up.&#8221;
According to a <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13207861/Anger-museum-lists-Margaret-Thatcher-Punch-Judy-villain-alongside-Hitler-Bin-Laden.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> published Sunday by The Daily Mail, the V&amp;A took in the majority of it&#8217;s funding from the government through the Department of Culture — to the tune of £67 million — in the last year.

Thatcher In Thought

London Museum Showcases ‘Contemporary Villains’: Hitler, Bin Laden, And … Margaret Thatcher?

London Museum Showcases 'Contemporary Villains': Hitler, Bin Laden, And ... Margaret Thatcher?

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Around 20% of young Americans view Osama Bin Laden — the mastermind behind the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history — in a positive light, according to a new <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12890583/americans-osama-bin-laden-poll-gen-zers.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Daily Mail</a> poll. 
The <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12890583/americans-osama-bin-laden-poll-gen-zers.html">poll</a>, which surveyed voters between 18 and 29 years old, also found that around 30% of the young Americans believe the views that guided Bin Laden were a “force for good,” The Daily Mail reported. Bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy Seals in May of 2011 after a decade-long manhunt for the radical Islamic terrorist. The al-Qaeda leader orchestrated the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., which killed nearly 3,000 Americans. 
Of the 18-29-year-olds surveyed in the poll, 8% said they had a “completely positive” view of Bin Laden while another 12% said they had a “somewhat positive” view of the infamous terrorist. Among those who viewed Bin Laden positively, 8% said both his “views and actions” were good, and 23% said his views were good but his actions were bad, according to the Mail. Eighty-one percent of those polled overall held a negative view of Bin Laden.
The Daily Mail poll results come a month after viral TikTok videos showed young Americans discussing Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/man-who-killed-bin-laden-responds-to-viral-tiktok-trend-praising-the-terrorists-letter-to-america" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sympathizing</a> with the al-Qaeda leader after reading it. The letter outlines Bin Laden’s justification for the 9/11 terrorist attack on U.S. soil. 
Terry Strada, whose husband died in the North Tower on 9/11, told the Mail that the poll results are a “horrifying” and “disturbing” sign that terrorism is being “normalized” in the U.S. 
“What is wrong with our youth? How do they not realize the horrors of terrorism?” Strada asked. “This is a dangerous and slippery slope to go down.” 
Another American who lost a loved one on 9/11 blamed the U.S. government’s lack of transparency about Saudi involvement in the terror attack for the rise in young Americans’ sympathies for Bin Laden. 
“We have never been told the full story or truth about what happened to us on 9/11,” said Brett Eagleson, whose father perished in the South Tower. “So it’s no wonder why today’s youth and adolescents have taken such extremist views supporting the evil that visited us that day. We have a two-decades-long government cover up to blame for this.” 
<a href="https://onelink.to/dwapp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-describedby="sk-tooltip-9096" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://onelink.to/dwapp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1703684399691000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0m2xSiGF1JK_f4B43pJkSz">CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP</a>
“The time is past for a full accounting of the Saudi Government[‘s] role in 9/11 as well the intelligence failures of the US government,” Eagleson added. 
In October, a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/majority-of-muslim-americans-believe-hamas-was-justified-in-its-terror-attacks-against-israel">survey</a> conducted by Cygnal showed that a majority (57.5%) of Muslim Americans believed Hamas was “justified” in its terrorist attack against Israel. While most Muslim Americans defended Hamas’ actions on October 7, 75% of all Americans condemned Hamas for attacking Israel and murdering around 1,200 people.

20% Of Young Americans View Osama Bin Laden In A ‘Positive’ Light: Poll

20% Of Young Americans View Osama Bin Laden In A 'Positive' Light: Poll

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Poll

terrorism

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Lynette Adkins isn&#8217;t exactly the person you&#8217;d expect to kickstart a social media conversation about international terrorism, and how Osama bin Laden might have done the right thing by ordering the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For one thing, Lynette Adkins is a recent college graduate whose latest <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qDEhVKb_gM" target="_blank" rel="noopener">video</a> on YouTube is entitled, &#8220;getting hotter &amp; making friends in LA.&#8221; And in 2021, Adkins was <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-09-23/content-creators-meet-lynette-adkins-youtube-influencer-marketing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">profiled</a> by The Los Angeles Times, not for her great insights on world affairs, but because of her videos on, &#8220;college life, skin and hair care,&#8221; including &#8220;a tutorial for Black women growing out their natural hair.&#8221; Adkins, the Times reported, was mainly successful because she often told her followers — which now number well over 200,000 on various social media platforms — how they could quit their white-collar jobs and become a vapid social media personality like herself.
But just a couple of days ago, Adkins offered an insight into a very different topic. Claiming she was in the midst of an existential crisis, Adkins posted this short video on TikTok:
https://twitter.com/Kulesh0vEffect/status/1724714049781588052?s=20
She’s having an existential crisis, she says. We&#8217;re now a long way from telling black women how to grow out their natural hair. In that clip, Adkins conspicuously doesn&#8217;t mention what &#8220;A Letter to America” is, apparently because she worried people might not be interested in the document when they learned it was Osama bin Laden&#8217;s manifesto justifying the 9/11 attacks.
But in the end, Adkins&#8217; ploy apparently worked. As the New York Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/11/16/business/tiktok-shredded-as-osama-bin-ladens-letter-to-america-gets-viral-praise-terrorist-propaganda/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported,</a> Adkins single-handedly &#8220;jumpstarted&#8221; a flood of activity on social media, and in particular on TikTok, about Osama bin Laden&#8217;s manifesto. Several <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/the-guardian-deletes-osama-bin-laden-letter-to-america-tiktok/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">other outlets</a> also credited Adkins for what happened next. The #lettertoamerica hashtag on TikTok racked up more than 14 million views and on X (Twitter), the same hashtag quickly accounted for nearly 100,000 posts. 
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1265-osama-bin-laden-becomes-a-tik-tok-influencer-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
The journalist Yashar Ali <a href="https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1724942399431217457" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> that in thousands of TikToks, people of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds responded to bin Laden&#8217;s letter. And for the most part, these TikToks involved young people saying bin Laden&#8217;s letter has led them to reevaluate their perspective on terrorism, and how it can, in fact, be a legitimate form of protest to a hostile, colonizing power. He uploaded just a small handful of these TikToks. We’ll take a look at a small handful of that handful:
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Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous &quot;Letter to America,&quot; in which he explained why he attacked the United States.
The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and… <a href="https://t.co/EwjiGtFEE3">pic.twitter.com/EwjiGtFEE3</a>
&mdash; Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) <a href="https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1724942399431217457?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2023</a></blockquote>
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&nbsp;
Osama bin Laden, the mass murderer of 3,000 people, has opened their eyes. He has enlightened them with his penetrating insights and deep wisdom.
Now for anyone who lived through 9/11 — which many of these TikTok personalities didn’t — it might be hard to make sense of this. Twenty years ago, even the most rabid leftists on college campuses didn&#8217;t go out in public and proudly suggest that bin Laden was justified. That would have been unthinkable. Instead, the Left generally agreed that acts of terrorism that kill thousands of U.S. citizens were a bad thing. The mass protests that we saw after 9/11, which began in earnest 2002, were almost entirely in response to the planned U.S. military intervention in Iraq — a country that, it turns out, didn&#8217;t have anything to do with 9/11. That was the concern.
Until that point, the country was mostly unified. There was no groundswell of support on the Left in defense of 9/11, on the internet or elsewhere.
So what changed? For one thing, academic theories of &#8220;decolonization,&#8221; as the reaction to the events in the Middle East has made very clear, aren&#8217;t academic anymore. They&#8217;ve filtered down from the university system into the mainstream. But as I&#8217;ve said repeatedly, &#8220;decolonization&#8221; is about much more than Israel. And this latest TikTok trend makes that very clear. The ultimate objective of &#8220;decolonizers&#8221; is the destruction of anything that these zealots perceive as too white. 
Decolonization is a genocidal ideology. It expressly justifies the mass slaughter of innocents — white innocents, specifically — on the grounds that no white person can actually be innocent. That of course includes the thousands of people who died on 9/11 — and most people living in the United States right now.
One of the many striking aspects of this ideology is how incoherent and self-defeating it is. If Libs of TikTok&#8217;s videos are any indication, people on TikTok would be among the very first to get stoned to death if bin Laden&#8217;s version of Sharia Law ever came to the United States. (Which, by the way, is another demand in bin Laden&#8217;s <a href="https://archive.is/rjKSc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">letter</a> — the total subservience of the West to Sharia law). Only defeated and very confused people, with a constant connection to other very confused people on the internet, would ever support their own eradication like this. 
But none of these people uploading this nonsense to TikTok actually came up with this idea on their own. For a long time now, many commentators have lamented that &#8220;the schools are failing&#8221; and asked,&#8221;What are they teaching these kids?&#8221; and so on. But the answer has always been pretty clear. This is what they&#8217;re teaching. Schools have succeeded in creating exactly the sort of people they set out to create. They may not be explicitly defending bin Laden, but they are spreading a deep hatred of white Western civilization. They&#8217;ve taught that colonization is an abject and eternal evil, with no positive upshot whatsoever. They&#8217;ve told students that the very idea of policing is a white supremacist concept intended to victimize black people. They have taught that “whiteness” is a sickness, a cancer, that must be eradicated. This is the actual language used in schools. Of course they&#8217;ve said the same thing about fundamental concepts like biology, as well. Schools want students to grow into adults who hate this country and everything about it. And that&#8217;s exactly what we&#8217;re seeing right now.
At the same time, the blame doesn&#8217;t entirely fall on the university system. For one thing, it&#8217;s probably not a coincidence that this trend is taking off on a Chinese social media app. As hard as this may be to believe, there are consequences to allowing millions of kids to spend their entire day ingesting content from an algorithm controlled by a communist adversary. In a follow-up video, the woman who apparently started this whole trend on TikTok, Lynette Adkins, went on to acknowledge that TikTok has a role in reprogramming Americans. 
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Here is the video so that no-one will have to click and enter the den of scum which is TikTok&#8230; <a href="https://t.co/L5uDaq1aJR">pic.twitter.com/L5uDaq1aJR</a>
&mdash; Assaf (@AssafTheGeek) <a href="https://twitter.com/AssafTheGeek/status/1725096392723435872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Young people, Lynette Adkins says, &#8220;have been so programmed to think a certain way.&#8221; And now, she says, &#8220;TikTok is undoing all of that. It&#8217;s crazy to watch in real time.&#8221;
That&#8217;s an understatement. It may be the only true and useful thing that Lynette has ever said on her various social media channels. And apparently, it&#8217;s the last thing she&#8217;s going to say. As of this morning, Lynette&#8217;s videos on TikTok — including the one I just showed you — are all inaccessible. Her account apparently doesn&#8217;t exist anymore. It&#8217;s not clear whether TikTok took her account down, or if she deleted her account herself. We reached out to her for an explanation, and she didn&#8217;t respond.
For its part, TikTok is claiming to be outraged by all of this. They&#8217;ve suppressed any videos that use the term &#8220;Letter to America&#8221; or &#8220;Osama bin Laden.&#8221; If you try to search for it, you&#8217;ll get a warning about &#8220;community guidelines.&#8221; And the company has put out statements saying they&#8217;re horrified that this letter has resurfaced. And they&#8217;re not the only ones saying that. The Guardian, which hosted a <a href="https://archive.is/rjKSc">version of this letter</a> on their website for the past 20 years, deleted the letter from its website in response to all the traffic from TikTok. And of course, in response, interest in bin Laden&#8217;s letter only grew from there, because you can&#8217;t delete anything from the internet. If you try, you just encourage more people to seek it out. Which is why the Guardian’s decision to delete the letter was ridiculous, and did more harm than good.
You can interpret these reactions from TikTok and The Guardian however you want. You can choose to believe that a social media platform controlled by the Communist Party of China is deeply upset that American youth are talking about how bin Laden was justified in taking down the Twin Towers. You can choose to believe that social media mercenary Lynette Adkins, for some reason, decided out of the blue one day to promote this whole idea.
But no matter what — whether you think this is just the latest successful Chinese propaganda effort or not — one fact remains, which no amount of online censorship can change. The truth is that, after 9/11, there were scattered reports of celebrations that broke out in response to the violence. Most of those reports are unverified and disputed to this day. But if another 9/11 happened today, it wouldn&#8217;t be hard to find people celebrating. All you&#8217;d have to do is look at any college campus, or go on TikTok. That’s the harshest reality to contemplate. Everyone was basically on the same page after 9/11 — everyone was sad, everyone was angry. And that was the last time we would all be on the same page about anything. If a similar attack were launched today, we would not even be able to all agree that it’s a sad thing.
That fact is now unavoidable. It&#8217;s unavoidable because of an ideology that both parties have been subsidizing in the university and public school systems for decades. This is an ideology that our leaders have done nothing to combat, for all the years it festered. So now, instead of our young people looking up to great authors or public servants — people with good moral character — they look up to tedious social media &#8220;influencers&#8221; like Lynette Adkins. That&#8217;s as humiliating an indictment of a society as you can find.
But for China, which controls TikTok, it&#8217;s fantastic news. Xi Jinping just <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-16/xi-says-china-seeks-to-be-friends-with-us-wants-peaceful-ties?embedded-checkout=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener">promised</a> at the APEC Summit that there will be no &#8220;hot war&#8221; with the United States. What he didn&#8217;t say is that he won&#8217;t need to launch a hot war in order to weaken, delegitimize, and ultimately destroy this country. All he needs is an army of useful idiots who want to destroy Western civilization from within.
And if there&#8217;s anything we can learn from what happened on TikTok this week, it&#8217;s that Xi Jinping now has that army. And it&#8217;s bigger and dumber than he could have possibly hoped for.

US And EU Ban TikTok From Staff Mobile Devices

Osama Bin Laden Becomes A TikTok Influencer

Leftists

Matt Walsh

Readers Pass

social media

tiktok

A new viral trend on China-owned social media platform <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/tiktok" target="_blank" rel="noopener">TikTok</a> includes largely younger people praising and agreeing with notorious terrorist <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/osama-bin-laden" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Osama bin Laden</a>&#8216;s &#8220;Letter to America.&#8221;
The letter, which is filled with anti-Western and anti-Semitic language, is a justification from bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks, which killed roughly 3,000 Americans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
&#8220;Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous &#8216;Letter to America,&#8217; in which he explained why he attacked the United States,&#8221; journalist Yashar Ali posted to X. &#8220;Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they’ll never see geopolitical matters the same way again. &#8230; [and many] say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to a hostile power.&#8221;
In one viral video, a woman said the letter is &#8220;wild&#8221; and &#8220;everyone should read it,&#8221; adding that reading it has &#8220;left her disillusioned.&#8221;
Another woman said reading the letter left her reeling in an &#8220;existential crisis,&#8221; and encouraged viewers to also read it. &#8220;In the last 20 minutes, my entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed and I have lived has changed. Please read that entire letter.&#8221;
&#8220;I need you to stop what you&#8217;re doing and go read a &#8216;Letter to America,'&#8221; a male said on video. &#8220;It is literally the craziest thing I have read in a while and while I can&#8217;t say that I&#8217;m not surprised, I&#8217;m pretty shocked.&#8221; He then proceeded to read the following X post, which he said was reminiscent of the letter: &#8220;Under settler colonialism, any kind of resistance is branded as [terrorism] because the only acceptable violence is violence by the occupier.&#8221;
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Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous &quot;Letter to America,&quot; in which he explained why he attacked the United States.
The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and… <a href="https://t.co/EwjiGtFEE3">pic.twitter.com/EwjiGtFEE3</a>
&mdash; Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) <a href="https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1724942399431217457?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Robert O&#8217;Neill, the Navy SEAL who killed bin Laden, responded to the trend: &#8220;Deceit is a mask the Devil puts over the eyes of useful idiots.&#8221;
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The new Tik Tok fad is the positive reaction from gen Z after reading &quot;Letter to America&quot; by Osama bin Laden.
Deceit is a mask the Devil puts over the eyes of useful idiots.
&mdash; Robert J. O&#39;Neill (@mchooyah) <a href="https://twitter.com/mchooyah/status/1725151785411596691?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Others reacted, too. Politico Noam Blum said, &#8220;TikTok brain is reading a rant by Osama bin Laden, realizing you agree with him on everything, and concluding not that you need to rethink your life, but that you need to rethink your priors about Osama bin Laden.&#8221;
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TikTok brain is reading a rant by Osama bin Laden, realizing you agree with him on everything, and concluding not that you need to rethink your life, but that you need to rethink your priors about Osama bin Laden.
&mdash; Noam Blum (@neontaster) <a href="https://twitter.com/neontaster/status/1724983521494900911?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2023</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Osama Bin Laden is being praised on the left for attacking America,&#8221; radio host and Outkick founder Clay Travis posted to X. &#8220;And TikTok is helping these clips go viral to idiot kids. This is what happens when for a generation the left has taught kids that America is evil.&#8221;
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Osama Bin Laden is being praised on the left for attacking America. And Tik Tok is helping these clips go viral to idiot kids. This is what happens when for a generation the left has taught kids that America is evil. <a href="https://t.co/5q7mX6bysA">https://t.co/5q7mX6bysA</a>
&mdash; Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) <a href="https://twitter.com/ClayTravis/status/1725192206753939788?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2023</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;If you kids think Bin Laden made some good points, wait&#8217;ll I tell you about a vegetarian former art student with an ironic mustache whose impassioned manifesto about the Zionist oppression of his people sparked a worldwide movement,&#8221; David Burge mocked, adding, &#8220;I feel I&#8217;m gonna regret this tweet because these motherf***ers are so stupid the next Tik Tok dance craze will be goosestepping.&#8221;
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I feel I&#39;m gonna regret this tweet because these motherfuckers are so stupid the next Tik Tok dance craze will be goosestepping
&mdash; David Burge (@iowahawkblog) <a href="https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/1725191798354583668?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 16, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Journalist Megyn Kelly zoned in on the parents of some of the younger people participating in the trend. &#8220;To the parents of all of these losers suddenly persuaded by the deranged musings of the man who murdered 3k American innocents: you failed,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;You were likely boozing, marching for some L-wing cause and/or simply ignoring your kids. You failed to teach wrong from right, a proper moral code, a love of country and perspective on America’s role in the world. [Because] you failed, my kids and others are going to have to grow up battling these a**holes for the future of the United States. I have every confidence they can do it, but I resent and judge you for making it necessary as opposed to fostering a life in which they can focus solely on growth, joy, love, family, hard work and creation.&#8221;
&#8220;No point getting bogged down in it however, trust me when I tell you that the majority of Americans &#8211; this generation and the next &#8211; will fight to defeat the pernicious lunacy you’ve unleashed,&#8221; Kelly added. &#8220;And we will win.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/i-cant-believe-i-fought-for-this-bulls-navy-seal-who-killed-bin-laden-blasts-u-s-navy-using-drag-queen-to-recruit" target="_blank" rel="noopener">‘I Can’t Believe I Fought For This Bulls***’: Navy SEAL Who Killed Bin Laden Blasts U.S. Navy Using Drag Queen To Recruit</a>

Robert O’Neill speaks onstage during book signing and lecture at Richard Nixon Library on July 26, 2017 in Yorba Linda, California.

Man Who Killed Bin Laden Responds To Viral TikTok Trend Praising The Terrorist’s ‘Letter To America’

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