November 18, 2023

Saturday, November 18, 2023. Annette’s News Roundu

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Joe is always busy.

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The Trump Kushner Univision Scandal.

This could seriously hurt Joe Biden in 2024.

Univision, the Spanish-language news giant, shifts its approach to Trump.

When Donald Trump ran for reelection in 2020, his campaign called Univision, the nation’s most influential Spanish-language network, “a leftist propaganda machine and a mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.”


“We shall treat them accordingly,” top advisers promised.
Three years later, Trump is treating Univision and its new corporate owners like long-lost friends. He hosted a trio of its executives at Mar-a-Lago last week during an hour-long Univision interview that was notable for its gracious tone, starting with a question about how well he is doing among Latino voters in early general election polling.

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, a friend of one of the executives, helped arrange the interview and was also in the room, according to multiple people familiar with the event.


“All you have to do is look at the owners of Univision. They’re unbelievable entrepreneurial people, and they like me,” Trump said in response to the question about Latino voters.


The reversal has shocked Democrats — who are preparing a massive ad campaign to brand Trump as hostile to Latino interests — and some journalists inside Univision, who think that the past week has demonstrated the heavy hand of their new corporate bosses. The Mexican media company Grupo Televisa, which has long fostered a close relationship with Mexican political leaders, merged with Univision in 2021.


The Democratic alarm further spiked two days later, when Univision advertising representatives told the Biden campaign that spots already purchased to run during the Trump interview in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Florida had been canceled — owing to a heretofore unannounced policy about opposition advertising in single-candidate interviews.


Univision also canceled a booking with Biden’s Hispanic media director, Maca Casado, to respond to the Trump interview after it aired on the network’s late news broadcast, according to people familiar with the details, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.


Not since 2004, when President George W. Bush outperformed among Latino voters, has the Spanish-speaking population been so up for grabs in a presidential contest, according to early polling. Democrats now fear they are losing their access to a network that has been instrumental in past elections in aggressively reporting on Trump’s immigration policies and their effect on Latino viewers.

The concerns were first raised in November 2022, when Univision took the unusual step of interrupting programming to cover Trump’s Mar-a-Lago campaign announcement live. When Biden gave an Oct. 19 prime-time address on Israel and Ukraine, the network cut away from the remarks midway, directing viewers to an online stream of the remarks, according to a Democratic media tracker.


“The new ownership is essentially co-opting and kidnapping the soul and mission of what Univision has been up to now, and they are serving it up on a silver platter to Donald Trump,” said Maria Cardona, a political consultant and member of the Democratic National Committee. “It is going to mask the pernicious and dangerous politics that Donald Trump is going to implement if he becomes president again.”
Semafor first reported the presence of three executives at the Nov. 7 interview — TelevisaUnivision CEO Wade Davis as well as TelevisaUnivision Mexico co-CEOs Alfonso de Angoitia Noriega and Bernardo Gomez Martinez.

Puck first reported the cancellation of ads and of the Biden official response to Trump’s interview.
The Biden and Trump campaigns declined to comment.
Over multiple campaign cycles, Univision’s news division has long fostered a reputation for challenging power with abrasive questions. As a result, Republicans have largely steered clear of its airwaves.


The network’s most famous journalist, Jorge Ramos, came to work in the United States after quitting at Televisa in Mexico, where he said he was not allowed to report on criticism of the government.

Since then, he has built a reputation by challenging powerful people and rejecting the deferential approach to political journalism.
Ramos was deported from Venezuela in 2019 after confronting President Nicolás Maduro about the suffering in his country. He demanded that Hillary Clinton state in a 2016 debate whether she would continue deporting children if she became president.

When Ramos confronted Trump in 2015 about Latino concerns over his immigration rhetoric at a news conference, Trump security escorted him out of the room.


“Go back to Univision,” Trump said.

The network later backed out of a contract with Trump’s company to air the Miss Universe contest, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court in 2016.


At the time, Univision was chaired by Haim Saban, a major donor to Clinton who no longer chairs the company. Clinton campaign emails, which U.S. officials say Russian intelligence officers hacked in 2016, revealed that Saban had suggested a meeting between a senior Clinton campaign official and a Univision news executive at the start of her campaign.


People familiar with the situation inside Univision described alarm and discomfort in the newsroom last week about corporate’s role in setting up the Trump interview, the selection of the interviewer and the decision to shut out Biden’s response.
Kushner, who has been minimally involved with Trump’s current campaign, surprised some Trump advisers by helping to broker the Univision interview, according to people familiar with the process. Kushner has a long working relationship with one of the executives who went to Mar-a-Lago, Gomez, a political player in Mexico who, the Associated Press reported, hosted a 2019 dinner at his home in Mexico City with Kushner and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.


Trump’s team thinks they can win a larger portion of the Hispanic and Latino vote in 2024 than he did in 2020, and he often brags privately about how his numbers with minorities were better than other GOP candidates, including Mitt Romney.


“This is Latin American stuff. This is the way people in Latin America deal with power,” said the person familiar with the situation inside Univision about the Trump interview, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations. “It certainly is a repudiation of the example Jorge Ramos has set.

”
Others familiar with strategy behind the Univision interview have described it as a valuable step to reset the network’s journalism to more completely reflect the politics of Latino voters in the United States.


“It’s important that we show the audience that when we talk about diversity, we also mean points of view,” this person said.
Spokespeople for TelevisaUnivision did not respond to a request for comment from Ramos.


In an unsigned corporate statement, TelevisaUnivision told The Washington Post it had been seeking an interview with Trump since 2015, and that the event “held significant importance for our audience.”
“It’s worth noting that our news division operates independently of the corporation’s ad sales division. The decision was made by the company to abstain from political advertising during the interview,” the statement said. “Similarly, there will be no Trump advertising during the President Biden interview we have been trying to secure for many months.”


A Biden campaign official said that while Univision had requested an interview with the president, there had been no offer comparable to Trump’s, which involved an hour-long sit-down that was broadcast during the network’s highest-rated hour, 10 p.m., in place of a highly rated telenovela soap opera. The campaign received its first request for a Biden interview after the Trump interview aired, the official said.


“We have been requesting an interview for months to then discuss its details,” the company responded in an unsigned statement. “The door is open to Biden to speak with us in any way he would like.

”
Rather than use local talent for the interview, Univision flew in Enrique Acevedo, a journalist now working for Televisa in Mexico City who has extensive experience reporting on politics in the United States. He co-moderated a 2016 Democratic presidential primary debate for Univision, and worked as a correspondent for CBS News’s “60 Minutes.

”
He left questions about immigration until the second half of the interview, avoided follow-ups and did not challenge Trump when he falsely claimed to have built a border wall paid for by Mexico or argued that President Barack Obama started the practice of child separation at the border. (There was no direct mechanism for Mexico to pay for the partial border wall built by Trump, despite an increase in trade tariffs. Obama’s administration did sometimes separate migrant children from families in cases where the children were in danger, but did not separate families to deter border crossings like Trump.)


After the interview, Acevedo defended his approach on the social media platform X, suggesting a shift from the more confrontational style that has been Univision’s calling card.
“I’m a reporter and my job is to ask questions,” Acevedo wrote in Spanish. “Information should be the protagonist here.” (Washington Post).

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From our good Representative from California, Eric Swalwell - a reminder.

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Celebrating Two Decades of Marriage Equality on the Anniversary of the Landmark Goodridge v. Department of Public Health Ruling.

Twenty years ago, on Nov. 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) issued its watershed decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, making Massachusetts the first U.S. state where same-sex couples could legally marry. 

“The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all Individuals,” Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall wrote in her powerful majority ruling, which continues to be included in wedding celebrations. “It forbids the creation of second-class citizens.”

“When the SJC decided Goodridge, it forever changed the standards for how LGBTQ+ people must be treated under law and raised the bar for equality across the country. This momentous victory would not have happened without the courage, commitment, and perseverance of the fourteen Goodridge plaintiffs,” said GLAD Senior Director of Civil Rights and Legal Strategies Mary L. Bonauto, who was lead counsel in Goodridge and argued before the Supreme Court in Obergefell. “Their willingness to repeatedly open themselves to public scrutiny, to share the truth of their lives with their neighbors, and to face opposition from powerful leaders and institutions, ushered in legal and cultural shifts toward greater acceptance, protection, and integration of LGBTQ+ people and families in our communities. We remain grateful for the powerful and empowering efforts of the Goodridge plaintiffs in making marriage equality a reality in Massachusetts and beyond.” (From the website of GLAD … Gay Legal Advocates and Defenders)

One more thing. Or two.

The world didn’t come to an end.

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Marriage Equality has spin-offs, if we learn from history.

Amid anti-trans attacks, same sex marriage victory holds lessons, hope.

We misremember marriage equality as 'easy' fight. But it paved the way for trans rights.

If we continue to harness the power of our stories, respect the journeys that people are on, and make sure a variety of voices are heard to reach the cross-section of America, we will prevail.

by Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen and Marc Solomon

Twenty years ago this week, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled, for the first time in American history, that same-sex couples were entitled to the freedom to marry in a trail-blazing case brought by GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders. These days, the two of us often hear how speedy – even easy – that fight was, compared with today’s efforts to win freedom for transgender people. 

But that’s a misreading of history. It forgets how politicians at every level of government either ran from the issue of marriage or weaponized it. And through that misremembering, it makes the fight for transgender equality seem exponentially more difficult, perhaps even impossible, given today’s attacks on trans kids’ ability to access health care, play sports and be respected in school. With a truer memory of the marriage fight – the deep resistance and the strategies that enabled victory – we’re confident we will also win full equality for transgender people. 

On marriage, our community’s demand was audacious: Let a stigmatized group join a most cherished institution. Opposing forces – including the Catholic Church hierarchy, the Mormon Church and evangelicals across faiths – vowed that allowing same-sex couples to marry would destroy the institution of marriage, harm children and irreparably damage society. In response, President Bill Clinton signed the federal Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, President George W. Bush pushed for a federal constitutional amendment banning marriage for same-sex couples in 2004, and it wasn’t until 2012 – after same-sex couples were marrying in six states and D.C. – that President Barack Obama voiced support.

The battle for trans rights won't be easy

The truth is that a battle over acceptance of difference, on something as fundamental as gender or marriage, is never easy. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” On the hopeful side of the equation, Americans overwhelmingly believe in the Golden Rule – treating others the way we want to be treated – but to get people to apply it to specific groups of people, they need to be able to genuinely empathize and connect. This can be especially difficult when opposing political strategists seek to score points by sowing fear of the other.

The good news: Trans advocates, working bravely and smartly for decades, have made tremendous strides in demonstrating the dignity of trans people, including young people. Polling shows 64% of Americans favor laws protecting transgender people from discrimination, and 22 states have passed trans-inclusive nondiscrimination laws. Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch, joined by Kavanaugh and Roberts, wrote in Bostock that trans people deserve protection from workplace discrimination.

President Joe Biden has been a stalwart champion for trans people. And Republican governors in deep red states – including the governors of Utah and Arkansas, issued heartfelt statements while vetoing cruel anti-trans measures. 

As we face anti-trans attacks, we should apply more of what’s gotten us so far on nondiscrimination for transgender people and was so central to the success of the marriage movement. 

Starbucks gave trans employees lifeline.Then they put our health care at risk.

Sharing trans stories will win hearts and minds

First: We must share our stories. The public needs to know trans people not as “those people somewhere far away,” but as people in our communities. That means introducing more transgender people to the public and empowering allies like medical professionals, faith leaders and family members from all walks of life – religious, conservative, rural, you name it – to speak out and vocalize their support. We’ve seen that often, people can identify more with the stories of parents with gay or trans kids, for instance, than with gay or trans people themselves. And that’s okay – after all, our goal is to move folks toward understanding.

It’s also critical to recognize that people take a while to understand – and that, too, is okay. We need to normalize, not punish, that sense of unfamiliarity in order to combat the rampant misinformation being spread by anti-transgender extremists.

How far we've come:Respect for Marriage Act is a triumph for families, freedom – and American activism

In the marriage work, we saw people’s internal conflict as an opportunity to take them on a journey to a place of support. Similarly, we want people to see how their own personal values lead them to embrace dignity and freedom for transgender people. Let’s answer folks’ real questions, have parents model their journey stories, and elevate professionals who know the science. And let’s stop thinking of people with conflicted feelings around transgender rights as being against us and start thinking of them as people who are not yet with us. Writing people off may be popular on social media – but it alienates people rather than accelerating their evolutions.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that to win, we must never, ever give up. If we continue to harness the power of our stories, respect the journeys that people are on, and make sure a variety of voices are heard to reach the cross-section of America, we will prevail. On the marriage journey, there were many points where our ostensible allies pushed us hard to stop. But we kept going, using the approaches that brought people, legislatures and presidents our way.

Winning is neither impossible nor inevitable. We must push through this painful period, remember the victories that we’ve been racking up and keep our heads up, forever staying focused on our goals of freedom and equality for all.

Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen is the Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Marc Solomon, a partner at Civitas Public Affairs Group, was national campaign director of Freedom to Marry. He is the author of "Winning Marriage: The Inside Story of How Same-Sex Couples Took On the Politicians and Pundits – and Won."

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On Rosalynn Carter.

The former first lady, who recently announced that she has dementia, is now in hospice. She joined her husband, former President Jimmy Carter, who has been in hospice care since February.

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Israel-Hamas War.

On Thursday, President Biden said hospitals in Gaza are used by Hamas. Some have asked for the proof. Why is it so hard to get?

Israel Says Hospital Held Hamas Command Center: How Long Could It Take for Proof?

Military experts say it could take days, weeks or months for Israel to make a definitive case. Or it might never come.

A stone-and-concrete shaft on the grounds of the Al-Shifa Hospital, seen on Thursday.

Israel is trying to produce solid evidence for its assertion that Hamas has been using tunnels under Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza as a command center. But an Israeli military-led tour of the hospital grounds with journalists Thursday night showed directly only a shaft in the ground with a staircase, which did not settle the issue.

A definitive answer is almost certain not to come overnight, military experts said.

What is the evidence so far?

Both Israel and the Biden administration say they have evidence that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are operating command centers and ammunition depots under hospitals in Gaza, as part of an effort to turn civilians using the hospitals into human shields.

Thursday night’s Israeli military tour showed that the shaft had electrical wiring, along with a metal staircase. In the darkness, it was unclear where the shaft led or how deep it went. The military said it had sent a drone down at least several meters into the shaft, which it said was found in the sand on the northern perimeter of the hospital complex.

Israel has also released a pair of videos from inside Gaza’s main children’s hospital that Israel said showed weapons and explosives found in the medical center, and a room where the military said hostages were kept. The videos contain a series of assertions that could not be independently verified.

The Israeli military said that soldiers had also found weapons at Al-Shifa and had recovered the bodies of two Israelis taken hostage in locations adjacent to the hospital.

Palestinian officials and doctors at Al-Shifa have denied that the hospital has been used by Hamas’s military.

American officials said this week that they have intelligence, separate from Israeli intelligence, that confirms that Hamas is operating command centers and ammunitions depots under hospitals. One official said that the intelligence is based on intercepts from fighters.

But the sensitive nature of the intelligence means that American officials have not described exactly what the intercepted communications say. Nor have they shown the intercepts to journalists.

How much time could it take for Israel to provide a conclusive account?

It could take weeks, months, or could never come, American military officials said on Friday.

American and Israeli officials said that many of the tunnels could be booby-trapped with bombs either remotely triggered or set to explode when something crosses a tripwire. In 2013, six Israeli soldiers were wounded, and one was blinded, when a booby trap exploded as they tried to shove a camera into a Hamas tunnel.

Whether this is the case under Al-Shifa Hospital or not, Israeli forces will view sending soldiers down into the tunnels as a measure of last resort, one Pentagon official said Friday.

Col. Elad Tsury, commander of Israel’s Seventh Brigade, said it might be days before troops descended into the shaft.

Pentagon officials privately said there was frustration that Israel did not take more time to plan the Gaza invasion, which could have allowed the Israeli Defense Forces to evacuate civilians. The lead-up to the American and Iraqi fight to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State in 2016, American officials said, took nine months, in part so that officials could work out how to limit civilian casualties.

By going in with no strategy for how they would minimize civilian casualties, one senior U.S. official said, Israel put itself in the position of trying to justify the high civilian death toll by proving that Hamas was using the hospital as a command center. That puts pressure on Israel, the official said, to make a case that could take months.

What is the wider significance of the hospital dispute?

Israel and Hamas are not just in a physical war — which Israelis say killed 1,200 Israelis in Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack, and which the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says has killed 11,000 Palestinians. The two sides are also in a war for global public opinion. That second war has put Israel under pressure.

A big part of the Israeli narrative is that Hamas is operating command headquarters under hospitals — essentially making human shields out of civilians, a war crime. But targeting a hospital is also a war crime in most circumstances.

So both sides are trying to show the other to be culpable in putting civilians at risk. Global opinion has shifted against Israel as the Palestinian death toll has gone up.

Critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say the Israeli government has been too expansive in its argument about human shields, since there are believed to be hundreds of tunnels all over Gaza, not just under the hospital.

“The notion of human shields, when applied so broadly, allows Israel to pre-emptively say everything is a legitimate target,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who is now president of the U.S. Middle East Project, a policy institute.

How many miles of tunnels are there under Gaza?

No one knows for sure. One U.S. official likened the tunnel network under Gaza to “miniature cities,” with subterranean pathways, rooms, cells and even roads for vehicles.

Hamas has spent years refining its tunnel networkunderneath the tiny coastal strip of more than two million people. Tunnels have been a part of life in Gaza for years, but they sharply multiplied after 2007, when Hamas took control of the enclave and Israel tightened a blockade of the territory. Palestinians responded by building hundreds of tunnels to smuggle in food, goods, people and weapons.

Some analysts have put the number of miles of tunnels in the hundreds. Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, said in 2021 that there were 310 miles of tunnels in Gaza.

In 2018, the Israel Defense Forces destroyed a tunnel that was more than a mile long.

What would it take to clear the tunnels?

One American military official said that it would likely take years for Israel to clear all of the Gaza tunnels. (New York Times).

Another Tunnel. Another Hospital in Gaza.

A view shows what the Israeli military says is an opening to Hamas underground infrastructure at Sheikh Hamad Hospital in this still image taken from an IDF video released Nov. 5, 2023.

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Advertisers Flee X as Outcry Over Musk’s Endorsement of Antisemitic Post Grows.

Apple has been a major advertiser on X, formerly Twitter, that the platform has cited to show that it’s safe for brands.

Disney, Apple, Paramount and Lionsgate halted marketing on X, formerly Twitter, as Elon Musk faced a furor over antisemitic abuse on his social media platform. (New York Times)

One more thing.

White House slams Elon Musk for supporting antisemitic post.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, that the White House condemns “this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms.”

“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of Antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Bates wrote. (Politico).

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Libraries will be closed on weekends in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, a decision by New York’s mayor, Eric Adams.

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How dangerous social media can be. A must-read.

How Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ reached millions online.

Videos citing the document had been viewed far less than many TikTok posts. Then a journalist made a compilation and posted it to X, causing attention to the manifesto to explode.

On Monday, a TikTok user with 371 followers, using the screen name “_monix2,” posted a video where she read parts of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” in which the late terrorist leader said his killings of nearly 3,000 Americans in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had been justified by the United States’ support of Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian territories.

By Wednesday night, the letter had become a point of discussion among left-wing creators on the video app, with some saying its critiques of American foreign policy had opened their eyes to a history they’d never learned.

But the letter didn’t rank among TikTok’s top trends. Videos with the #lettertoamerica hashtag had been seen about 2 million times — a relatively low count on a wildly popular app with 150 million accounts in the United States alone.

Then that evening, the journalist Yashar Ali shared a compilation he’d made of the TikTok videos in a post on X, formerly Twitter. That post has been viewed more than 38 million times. By Thursday afternoon, when TikTok announced it had banned the hashtag and dozens of similar variations, TikTok videos tagged #lettertoamerica had gained more than 15 million views.

The letter’s spread sparked a deluge of commentary, with some worrying that TikTok’s users were being radicalized by a terrorist manifesto, and TikTok’s critics arguing it was evidence that the app, owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, had been secretly boosting propaganda to a captive audience of American youth.

But the letter’s spread also reflected the bedeviling realities of modern social media, where young people — many of whom were born after 9/11 — share and receive information on fast-paced smartphone apps designed to make videos go viral, regardless of their content.

It also showed how efforts to suppress such information can backfire. Many of the videos on TikTok were posted after the British newspaper the Guardian, which had hosted a copy of bin Laden’s letter, removed it. Some TikTokers said the removal was proof of the letter’s wisdom and importance, leading them to further amplify it as a result.

“Don’t turn the long-public ravings of a terrorist into forbidden knowledge, something people feel excited to go rediscover,” Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford internet Observatory who has advised Congress on online disinformation, wrote Thursday in a post on Threads. “Let people read the murderer’s demands — this is the man some TikTok fools chose to glorify. Add more context.”

TikTok spokesman Alex Haurek said Thursday that the company was “proactively and aggressively” removing videos promoting the letter for violating the company’s rules on “supporting any form of terrorism” and said it was “investigating” how the videos got onto its platform.

Haurek said that the #lettertoamerica hashtag had been attached to 274 videos that had garnered 1.8 million views on Tuesday and Wednesday, before “the tweets and media coverage drove people to the hashtag.” Other hashtags, for comparison, dwarfed discussion of the letter on the platform: During a recent 24-hour period, #travel videos had 137 million views, #skincare videos had 252 million views and #anime videos had 611 million views, Haurek said.

Ali said he made the compilation video Wednesday after seeing “thousands” of the videos and intentionally left out the “most incendiary examples” because he didn’t want the compilation to be removed from Instagram, where he also posted it.

He agreed the hashtag had never trended on TikTok but disputed the idea that the number of videos posted there had been “small,” saying, “Sure, in the context of a global platform. But not small enough to be minuscule or not important.”

Most of the videos have since been removed by TikTok, making it difficult to get a full tally. But a search for the letter Thursday morning by a Washington Post reporter revealed around 700 TikTok videos, only a few of which got more than 1 million views.

Such high view counts are common on TikTok, where videos are served up in rapid fashion and the average U.S. user watches for more than an hour a day. One viral video last month, in which a young woman discussed the pain of a 9-to-5 job, has more than 3 million views and 280,000 likes.

The videos featured many people saying they’d known little about bin Laden and were questioning what they’d been taught about American involvement around the world. Some said they were “trying to go back to life as normal” after reading it; in one video, a user scrolled through the full letter and said, “We’ve been lied to our entire lives.”

But while many pointed to bin Laden’s comments on the Palestinian issue, few highlighted the letter’s more extreme criticism of Western “immorality and debauchery,” including “acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and trading with interest.”

Many commenters also criticized giving the letter attention or worked to remind people that bin Laden had preached an antisemitic, sexist ideology that led to thousands of deaths. On the “_monix2” video, one commenter said, “You guys Bin Laden wrote this. Do y’all know what he did. What is wrong with y’all [oh my God. I guess] we’re supporting terrorism these days.” (Attempts to reach the @_monix2 account were unsuccessful.)

Charlie Winter, a specialist in Islamist militant affairs and director of research at the intelligence platform ExTrac, said in an interview Thursday that he was “frankly really quite surprised at the response” to the letter, which he described as “a kind of core doctrinal text” for both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorist group.

In addition to long-standing grievances, the letter contains “blatant language that is clearly calling for acts of genocide … [and] for killing noncombatants in any nation that is democratic and is fighting against a Muslim-majority state,” he said.

“It’s not the letter that is going viral. It’s a selective reading of parts of the letter that’s going viral,” he said. “And I don’t know whether it’s because people aren’t actually reading it or, when they’re reading it, they’re reading the bits that they want to see.”

The letter’s spread online was celebrated Thursday by users on al-Qaeda forums, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online extremism. One user Thursday wrote that Islamist militants should capitalize on the opportunity, saying, “I hope you all are seeing ongoing storm on Social Media. … We should post more and more content.”

Some of the TikTok creators who shared the letter posted follow-up videos saying they did not support terrorism or violence. One of the first TikTok creators to share it, and who spoke to The Post on the condition that her name not be included in the story, said she had encouraged people to read it for “educational purposes.”

She said she did not “condone nor justify” bin Laden’s actions and was “distancing [herself] from this entire situation.” “It’s a sad world if we cannot even read a public document, simply to educate ourselves, without being smeared online,” she said.

TikTok has faced criticism and calls for a nationwide ban due to the popularity of pro-Palestinian videos on the app compared with pro-Israel content, even though Facebook and Instagram show a similar gap. In a video call organized by TikTok on Wednesday, first reported by the New York Times, some Hollywood actors and TikTok creators pushed company executives to do more to crack down on antisemitic content.

But the idea that the “Letter to America” discussion solely began on TikTok is challenged by Google data, which show that search interest in the “bin Laden letter” began gathering last week, days before it became a topic of TikTok conversation.

And TikTok is far from the only place where the letter has been discussed. Though Instagram blocked searches for some hashtags, some videos related to the letter — including those critical of it — remained publicly viewable Thursday on the Meta-owned app.

On Thursday afternoon, searches for “letter to America” on Instagram were still being given a “Popular” tag. One post, a series of screenshots of the letter, had more than 10,000 likes as of Thursday afternoon.

On Thursday, the letter and bin Laden’s name were also “trending topics” on X, the social network owned by Elon Musk. One tweet there from Wednesday — in which the writer said reading the letter was like feeling a “glass wall shatter,” and asks, “Is this what ex cult members feel like when they become self aware” — remained online Thursday, with nearly 3 million views.

The letter — a nearly 4,000-word translation of the al-Qaeda leader’s comments — had been originally posted in Arabic on a Saudi Arabian website used to disseminate al-Qaeda messages. The Guardian originally published an English translation in 2002 alongside a news article that offered more detail on how it had begun circulating among “British Islamic extremists.”

Though the Guardian removed the letter on Wednesday, its replacement, a page called “Removed: document,” had by Thursday become one of the most-viewed stories on the newspaper’s website. Some TikTokers voiced anger at the newspaper for, in the words of one, “actively censoring” information.

A spokesperson for the Guardian said in a statement that the letter had been removed after it was “widely shared on social media without the full context.”

The editors of the Guardian faced a “no-win scenario” once interest in bin Laden’s letter began to grow, Marco Bastos, a senior lecturer in media and communication at City, University of London, said in a phone interview.

“If they don’t take down the content, the content will be leveraged and it will be discussed, potentially shared and is going to go viral — if not out of context, then certainly outside of the scope of the original piece,” Bastos said. “If they take it down, they’re going to be accused, as they are right now, of censorship.”

At the time of publication, the editors “expected that this letter would be read critically, you know, adversarially … that you would process this within the view — or the bias, if you prefer — of the Western side of the events,” Bastos added. “And now it’s being consumed, distributed and shared to push an agenda that’s precisely the opposite of the one that it was originally intended for.”

Winter, the Islamist militant affairs specialist, said he found it “kind of ironic” that the letter was being shared uncritically around the web.

“People who consider themselves to be critical consumers of mainstream media are consuming this very uncritically and not thinking about the context around it,” he said. “Not thinking about everything that happened just over a year before it was published as well, in any meaningful way.” (Washington Post)

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One more time. Stephen Colbert visits Barbra again, this time to see the shopping mall in her basement.

If you didn’t see Jonathan Tolins’ play ‘Buyer & Cellar’ starring Michael Urie off-Broadway in 2013, here is your chance to see Barbra’s shops in the basement with La Streisand and M. Colbert as guides.

Have a fun visit. It’s been a rough week.

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