In his post on the newfound Osama bin Laden craze that has taken TikTok by storm, Jim writes that:
Robert Frost once said, “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” What we’re seeing in the recent “Wow, bin Laden made a lot of good points” crowd are Americans who will not take their own side in a war with people who are hell-bent on killing Americans.
There is something like self-loathing at work in our culture, a mentality that refuses to accept the contentions that we are good and worth protecting and worth continuing. This is a good time for us to continue what started Tuesday: to declare that nothing justifies the deliberate murder of civilians, to insist that we and our allies are good and worthy of defense and preservation, and to call out evil, and make sure that it meets up with the consequences of its actions, good and hard.
This, of course, is all correct. Much of what bin Laden says in his letter is indistinguishable from the output of your average Ethnic Studies Professor, so, grotesque as it most certainly is, the fact that the sort of people who are marinated in the output of your average Ethnic Studies Professor enjoyed reading it should probably not come as a great surprise. In his missive, bin Laden wrote:
Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts.
Had he not followed it up directly with “Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy,” this sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear openly on TikTok in pretty much every other context.
The same is true of his charge that:
Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities,
Which, if one takes out the next line — “to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures” — is standard-fare 2023-era progressivism.
But not all of the letter is like that, and one would have thought that at least some of it ought to have been reflexively, presumptively, self-evidently abhorrent to the nobody-purer-than-me TikTok crowd. At one point in the letter, bin Laden writes:
We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.
That’s cool with the LGBTQ+ advocates is it?
What about this, which is nothing more and nothing less than a call for a state religion?:
You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.
Or this, which demands that everyone become a Muslim?:
complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
Why isn’t this a problem? I find this question genuinely fascinating. What is it about those ideas being expressed by someone foreign — someone who can plausibly (albeit stupidly) be cast as a victim — that causes otherwise exquisitely sensitive people to completely gloss over them? In quotidian American politics, the most inconsequential of sentiments are routinely cast as being a part of the “white, male, cisgendered hegemony.” But Osama bin Laden starts talking about the evils of homosexuality and fornication, about the fusing of church and state, and about “complete submission to His Law,” and it’s just . . . ignored.
This same trend has been on display at many of the anti-Israel protests, where I’ve seen quite a lot of people wearing t-shirts that read, “Queers for Palestine” or “LGBT for Hamas” or what you will. It’s utterly delusional — almost to the point of pride. This is your brain on intersectionality. How to fight back remains anyone’s guess.
Wokesters for Osama bin Laden?
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16.11.2023
In his post on the newfound Osama bin Laden craze that has taken TikTok by storm, Jim writes that:
Robert Frost once said, “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” What we’re seeing in the recent “Wow, bin Laden made a lot of good points” crowd are Americans who will not take their own side in a war with people who are hell-bent on killing Americans.
There is something like self-loathing at work in our culture, a mentality that refuses to accept the contentions that we are good and worth protecting and worth continuing. This is a good time for us to continue what started Tuesday: to declare that nothing justifies the deliberate murder of civilians, to insist that we and our allies are good and worthy of defense and preservation, and to call out evil, and make sure that it meets up with the consequences of its actions, good and hard.
This, of course, is all correct. Much of what bin Laden says in his letter is indistinguishable from the output of your average Ethnic........
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