“Never forget.”

It’s the solemn reminder invoked every year on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America in 2001. The country united in shock, horror, fear and grief that day and in the months to follow as Osama bin Laden’s terror plan played out.

The act was an abomination, as is, 22 years later, the viral spread and embrace of the al Qaeda leader’s “Letter to America” on TikTok.

As the New York Times reported, Bin Laden’s letter, published a year after 9/11, defended the attacks in New York and Washington and said Americans had become “servants” to Jews, who he said controlled the country’s economy and media.

Some TikTok users said last week that they viewed the document as an awakening to America’s role in global affairs and expressed their disappointment in the United States.

One video with nearly 100,000 likes showed a TikTok user at her kitchen sink with the caption: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” In a video with more than 60,000 views, another user said the letter showed her that America was a “plague on the entire world.”

A subsequent search for #lettertoamerica showed videos with 14.2 million views. Alex Haurek, a spokesman for TikTok, said that “content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” and that the company was “aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”

As abhorrent as it was, the letter’s viral spread did serve one useful purpose: it exposed the ease in which propaganda and hate messages can disseminate across social media and be welcomed by an audience steeped in ignorance and gullibility.

9/11 Families United called out TikTok over the video, saying in a statement:

“These Americans were our husbands, wives, mothers, fathers.” It is appalling to witness younger Americans voicing sympathy for bin Laden’s dangerous and antisemitic worldview 22 years after our nation was horrifically attacked and our loved ones were callously murdered.”

That these younger Americans don’t remember the events of 9/11 is no excuse, they have had the opportunity to be informed and learn about our recent history. But facts are secondary when social media platforms serve as de facto information centers.

It’s how demonstrators on college campuses can decry Israel as a colonizer, ignoring the fact that Jews are indigenous to the region going back thousands of years, as are Palestinians. The term “colonizer,” however, has soundbite muscle and is accepted among the sign-waving set.

So too is the notion that the slaughter of men, women and children and the taking of hostages on Oct. 7 by Hamas terrorists falls under the umbrella of “resistance.”

Passion is not the same as wisdom.

This intellectual and moral desert was laid bare by the bin Laden letter’s resurfacing, and it’s a chilling wakeup call to the country.

Editorial cartoon by Joe Heller (Joe Heller)