Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” recently hit the TikTok newsroom as young adults sympathized with Bin Laden’s terroristic ideology- even saying he was right to commit 9/11. Most of these humans weren’t either alive for or cognizant of the terrors 9/11 brought on- meaning they also didn’t experience the last time Americans were united in a belief, that is, the patriotism following 9/11.
The anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Semitic rhetoric of the “Letter to America” made its TikTok debut at a convenient time. When anti-Semitism has been raging throughout the world, with synagogues under brutal attack and swastikas being marked on Jewish residences, young progressives are most susceptible to brainwashing and manipulation under the newest human rights fad.
Hamas knows this. That is why they hijacked TikTok and other social media platforms to feed young people’s minds anti-Semitic propaganda. As a Gen-Z who uses TikTok every day, I experienced a disproportionate amount of pro-Hamas and anti-Jew videos on my feed, which worried me.
An over-representation of terror and under-representation of sanity left me feeling alone in my correctness and, ultimately, hopeless for my generation, and I wonder how many other moral TikTok users were left feeling the same.
Young Americans, myself included, use TikTok as a search engine for news. Our attention span is decreasing by the day, and watching a 30-second clip on the latest bill to enter the House is far easier than finding and reading through an entire article. Because we get our news from an adversarial government, the Chinese Communist Party – the CCP, of course, tends to rub elbows with Iran.
ByteDance, the mega Chinese technology corporation behind TikTok, also has an Iranian version of the app, named Douyin. Douyin is used to share short, mass-produced videos, but has been called on by investigators to be spreading Iranian propaganda, fueled by the algorithms used by ByteDance and funneled into your child’s TikTok feed. Interestingly enough, both TikTok and Douyin were launched in 2016.
I am a conservative consumer of TikTok, meaning I primarily consume ideologically conservative content. This means that my TikTok algorithm should be showing me more conservative TikToks, and less of everything else (just how I like it). This being said, if I, a pro-America and pro-Israel consumer in TikTok’s eyes, have been receiving monstrous amounts of Hamas’s dumpster fire propaganda then I wonder what a left-leaning or even politically unbiased consumer’s TikTok algorithm would look like. I wonder. I worry.
Israel was given approximately five minutes of sympathy after their society was terrorized on the attack of October 7th. After the brief sympathy, American college liberals came out from the shadows once again to speak on an issue they had learned about approximately thirty seconds before, claiming that Israel’s defense towards Hamas in Gaza was “genocide.”
For years, Palestine has sent rockets and missiles into Israel, terrorizing and killing innocent Israelis and keeping the IDF on their toes. On October 7th, internationally-identified terrorist group Hamas proudly triumphed videos of the death and torture of 1,200 innocent Israeli men, women, and children while Palestinians celebrated in the streets of Gaza, praising Allah for the massacre they’d completed. Now, Hamas sends pre-produced videos of injured children and destroyed homes straight to CNN and The New York Times, calling for a cease-fire, and white liberals, presumably with degrees in things like lesbian dance theory, rally to show their support against what has been coined as “Israel’s Genocide.” Disgusting and disheartening.
But don’t be fooled; Hamas has had reign over the Gaza Strip since 2006, when Israel quite literally handed it to them to keep peace in the Middle East. For nearly 20 years, Hamas has terrorized Palestinians, enforcing Sharia Law in Gaza – enforcing the death penalty for gays and legalizing rape – and denying citizens Israel-provided humanitarian resources, like the water pipes provided by Israel that were fashioned into rockets to be used against Israel. Today, they use civilian commodities like hospitals and schools to store their military bases, an easy frame. So when marchers chant “Free Palestine” on American soil, I have to agree with them. Palestine should be freed from the dictatorship of Hamas rule.
So, if Hamas is so terrible, why are we seeing marches of hundreds of thousands of people for Palestine? Those marchers are one of two things: an ideological terrorist or an idiot.
What these morons seem to be forgetting is the severe difference in ideology between the West and the Middle East. Here in the West, we cherish life (at least most of us do). We hold a sense of moral high ground. We believe in REAL human rights, offer a place for those seeking asylum, and recognize our own shortcomings. While we trot virtue signaling of tolerance and multiculturalism, terrorists are planning our deaths. Those in Palestine value death- and they say it right to our face. They tell us over and over that they will put their own children in harm’s way to kill the enemy (us), and we choose to ignore it. The liberal elitists chalk Hamas’s threats down to a simple misunderstanding- surely they don’t really want to rape women and murder children…it’s all just lost in translation, right? Wrong.
I had the opportunity to ask Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator who happens to be Jewish, what it would take to bring America together again. If even a mass terror attack that killed over 3,000 Americans can’t unite us against terror, what will? Shapiro indicated his concern as well. “What usually causes unity is a feeling of existential threat, which is why, since the fall of the Soviet Union, there really has been no serious internal unity in the United States. Now it’s unfortunate that that’s sometimes what it takes,” he said. This is a scary reality to face, but a reality nonetheless.
The Biden Administration has 2.5 million encounters at the southern border- allowing thousands of illegal and unchecked immigrants in each day- with Middle Easterners among them. Since Biden took office and since his disastrous and cowardly withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iranian proxies and Middle-Eastern leadership have been salivating at American weakness. Biden’s America is a joke to them- we are malleable, indignant, and weak. Americans live in a utopian world of pronouns and equity for all, while terrorist militia is organizing our demise right under our noses. It’s time to wake up and smell the siege.
