Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
After Going Viral on TikTok, the Guardian Removes Bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” Israel and “Audience Capture,” & Following Our Interview, Hotels Refuse to Serve Roger Waters
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November 19, 2023
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Good evening. It's Thursday, November 16.

Tonight: After the 9/11 attack in 2001, Americans understandably wanted to know why would people be so enraged and hateful toward us that they'd be willing to give up their own lives to kill as many of us Americans as possible. That very natural curiosity quickly morphed into media shorthand: Why do they hate us? It was obvious that there must be some reason or a set of reasons why people in the Muslim and Arab world were so filled with anti-American sentiment that they wanted to attack our country in the most violent and traumatizing way possible. 

The neocons who dominated the Bush-Cheney administration and who also dominated major media discourse at the time had to provide an answer Americans wanted to know. What they settled on was this: They hate us for our freedom. According to this narrative, which was designed to flatter Americans and tell them that our leaders bore no blame of any kind for provoking an attack, people in the Muslim world saw that we are free, that we get to choose our leaders democratically, that women are free to work, that LGBT can live openly. That people have religious freedom. And this drove them so insane with rage and contempt that they just had to attack us and kill as many of us as they could over our freedom. Why? Because they hate us for our freedom. 

A very patriotic and reassuring message, to be sure, but also a childish and insultingly propagandistic one. There are countless free countries all over the world that Muslims are not attacking that way. From Japan, Greece and Brazil to South Korea, Norway, South Africa and so many more. There was something about the United States that made it such a specific and unique target beyond the fact that it was – sort of – free. 

One of the people who stepped into that debate was named Osama bin Laden, who is widely accused by the U.S. government, most Western intelligence agencies and the U.S. media, of being the leader of al-Qaida and thus the perpetrator of the 9/11 attack. Though he denied responsibility for that attack, he did write a letter in 2002 entitled “Letter to Americans” in which he purported to explain why so many Muslims in that part of the world feel resentment, rage and hatred for the United States. He did not say it was because the United States was a free country. He instead cited several U.S. policies that involved heavily interfering in their part of the world, including 1) imposing a sanctions regime on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children before the U.S. invasion in 2003; 2) deploying U.S. military troops and military bases onto Saudi Arabian soil, which Muslims throughout that region regard as religiously sacred and 3) the U.S. was arming, funding and supporting Israel's abuse and bombing of Palestinians over many decades. Bin Laden and many other so-called Islamic extremists who had been just a short time before American allies in the effort to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan, had cited these policy grievances many times before 9/11.

While the 9/11 attack and the so-called War on Terror that followed was pivotal to my own political trajectory and more Americans every year that goes by are too young to have lived through it. They don't know much about it, and many who lived through it, as we see often with history, have forgotten major parts of it. Within the last week, young Americans on social media, especially on TikTok, discovered this 2002 bin Laden letter on the site of The Guardian, the British newspaper where I once worked and that letter began to go viral. 

Many of these people who discovered this letter were shocked to learn that 9/11 anti-American hatred generally was at least partially motivated by these concrete policy grievances, including U.S. support for Israel. As a result, that bin Laden letter quickly went viral. 

It became one of the Guardian's most-read items – a 20-year-old item that had been on that site for two decades. Seeing that so many people were interested in this letter and regarding it, for the first time, the Guardian did something genuinely shocking for an ostensibly journalistic outlet: they removed the letter from their website at exactly the moment when people were craving to read it. They just deleted a crucial historical document precisely so that it could no longer be read or found by the TikTok users who had been sharing it and discussing and debating its significance. We'll examine this remarkable act of journalistic self-censorship and also examine why this letter and similar statements have long been so dangerous to Western elites and to the narratives they try to propagate.  

Then: we knew when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, and then Israel made clear that it would respond by unleashing what it promised to be an unprecedented war, that many people in our audience – certainly not all, but many – would be highly supportive of Israel – many vehemently so. I've been around for a long time, and I've been a long-time critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, as well as the bipartisan policy of arming and funding all of Israel and its wars. I obviously wasn't going to change my views or hide them suddenly to aggrandize or please the pro-Israel part of my audience or pretend that I believe things that I don't actually believe. To avoid angering people in the audience, I would think that would be incredibly disrespectful to you, my audience, and it would be something that would require sacrificing all of my integrity. 

But the term “audience capture” has become common in our new media ecosystem because it really does describe a real and dangerous phenomenon, especially in independent media, but even in corporate media. With so much of our media ideologically polarized, required by financial viability to only be able to speak to various strains of the left or the right or to the Democrats or Republicans, there is a very strong incentive to only tell your audience what they want to hear. With so many choices out there, so many podcasts, so many shows, so many voices on the Internet and on television, it's easier for people to just write off any journal as our host or show a writer that expresses a view on an issue of great importance to them that differs from their own out of anger. They'll just say, I'm not paying attention to that person anymore who has this view that I find so repellent on an issue I care so much about. And because so many media platforms and journalists now rely on keeping that audience happy, you need it for whatever model you've chosen, whether it's subscriptions or advertisers or anything else, it has led to a large number of journalists, I would submit, most petrified to ever take a view or even report facts that alienate a significant portion of their audience. That is a crippling way to do journalism. 

From the start, as we knew what happened, we did lose some of our viewers to the show and even some of our subscribers who are vehemently pro-Israel. Barely a day has gone by where I haven't heard from someone, usually more than one saying some variant of, “You know, I used to really like and respect your work when it came to the rights of Americans but given your criticism or lack of support for Israel, I no longer listen to you or subscribe to your show and your work.”

Most of our audience, I'm happy to say, has not responded that way, including most pro-Israel supporters. I've heard a lot of them saying, “I don’t agree with you on this issue, but that's all the more reason I'm going to continue to listen.” I'm proud to have attracted an audience that does not seek, expect, or demand full agreement on every issue, but instead demands an honest, well-prepared and illuminating set of reporting and analyses. But we have seen how real “audience capture” can be and the costs of angering a significant part of your audience. So, we wanted to spend some time examining this dynamic that most media now face and that I would submit can be very corrupting. 

Finally, two weeks ago or so, we interviewed the musical legend Roger Waters when he was passing through Rio de Janeiro for his world musical tour. During that interview, Roger Waters made some statements about the Israeli-Gaza war and the October 7 attack by Hamas that provoked some serious anger and controversy as we expected it might happen. He's a very polarizing figure. As a result of the statements he made in that interview with us, there has been a pressure campaign that has succeeded for hotels throughout the next countries he's visiting in Latin America, Argentina and Uruguay to deny him service, to refuse to let him stay at that hotel. He has had, in fact, difficulty finding hotels to stay in. 

I realize that people who loathe Roger Waters's use of Israel or even believe he is an anti-Semite may celebrate this outcome but I'd like to discuss the implications of it for anyone with ideas that are also considered extremist, dangerous and bigoted – which, in case you have forgotten, is how all anti-establishment voices on the right and even on the left have been regarded and still are regarded, and who have been the focal points of similar types of punishment campaigns up until October 7, when it all switched to Israel critics, but it will be switching back very shortly to many people now cheering this. So, this is probably a case of: be careful what you wish for. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 

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System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
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There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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