I just found out that Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” has been doing its rounds on TikTok but I haven’t seen anything about it been posted here on Lemmy about it. Perhaps people already know about it, I’m not sure. This is a link to the wayback machine. The original in the guardian has just been deleted after being online for 20 years.
Yeah I was surprised they took it down. I think it’s a foolish knee jerk reaction and is patronising towards readers.
Ironically there is know nothing to put the current spike of interest in context as you can’t read the letter on the guardian website.
I’m actually really unimpressed with the guardians action - they don’t respect their readers and clearly no longer believe in freedom of speech. They could have modified the article to put the letter in context themselves rather than link to a 20 year old article criticising it. It also makes it hard for those who want to push back against the letter and answer those who are pushing it.
Its quite feasible they had a call from the intelligence services.
There is precedent, from the Cambridge Six affair that they have been compliant.
What is the cambridge 6 affair
Cambridge five in fact - the “6”was a rumour
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five