Who in America shows up at protest marches and demonstrations to demand a “ceasefire now” in Gaza? Or to denounce Israel for being a “colonial-settler apartheid state”? Or to insist that “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free,” which is another way of calling for the disappearance of the Jewish state and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab one? I’m not referring to Arabs and Muslims. Their participation is a given. I mean the others.
Drumroll please, or at least a paradiddle: Those protesters are mainly the young, the college students who have turned our campuses into such unpleasant and even dangerous places for their Jewish classmates. Are they morally superior to the rest of us? What explains their reaction to events in Gaza? More on the young, who are less favorably inclined toward Israel than their wiser elders, can be found here: “Why do so many young Americans hate Israel? – opinion,” by Rafael Medoff, Jerusalem Post, January 31, 2024:
Young Americans are turning against Israel, and that’s Israel’s fault, says New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. Is he right?
In a major January 27 op-ed, Klein pointed to a recent poll showing only 27% of Americans aged 18 to 29 – known as “Gen Z” – are more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinian Arabs, as compared to 63% of Americans who are 65 or older. According to Klein, that’s because of the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, since young Americans “know only Netanyahu’s Israel.”
Does that mean all Gen Zers were pro-Israel when the left-of-center Yair Lapid was prime minister 14 months ago? Hardly. The real reason for hostility toward Israel among that age bracket is their ignorance of the history and facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not the specific policies of a particular prime minister.
Israel is not to blame if many young people choose to base their views on misleading Instagram photos, biased college professors, and radical ideologies that falsely paint Israel as a “white supremacist” state….
When the Soviets invaded Finland in November 1939, American communist college students defended the attack and denounced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal for modest financial aid to the Finns.
Not long afterward, FDR gave a previously scheduled address to thousands of activists from the American Youth Congress – including many of his communist critics. He decided to give them a piece of his mind.
The students’ claim that aid to Finland would “force America into an imperialistic war” was, the president said, “unadulterated twaddle.” He repeated that slap for emphasis. Roosevelt called their position “about the silliest thing that I have ever heard in my 58 years of life.”
Note the contrast between Roosevelt’s response to his youthful critics and the recent responses by President Joe Biden to pro-Hamas protesters. On two occasions when hecklers shouted at Biden over Gaza, he responded that he was pressuring Israel to slow down its actions against Hamas and to withdraw from Gaza. He treated the protesters’ shouts as reasonable, persuasive arguments, and sought to convince them he was already doing his best to implement their demands.
Biden’s unwillingness to denounce those protesters and, still worse, to attempt to placate them by explaining he was now pressuring Israel to “slow down” its campaign against Hamas, is surely one of the low points of his presidency. He ought, instead, to have denounced them, reminded them of the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7, and reaffirmed support for Israel which was only doing what any country, “including our own,” would be justified in doing in response to similar atrocities.
Not Roosevelt. He considered his pro-Soviet student critics to be ignoramuses and told them so. Despite audible boos from the crowd, he admonished the students that their positions were “based perhaps on sincerity, but, at the same time, on 90% ignorance” of the subject matter.
“There is room for improvement in common-sense thinking and definite room for improvement in the art of not passing resolutions concerning things one doesn’t know anything about,” the president said. He characterized his student critics as “young people [who] get a smattering of the subject from two or three speakers, who themselves have but a smattering on the subject.”
Has the political climate on America’s campuses changed very much since then? Whether Communist Party members then or Israel haters now, campus political activity is often steered by a handful of ideologically driven militants….
A small determined cell, like those who founded Students for Justice in Palestine, can form the nucleus of a group of protesters who then manage to attract other young, excitable, and above all ignorant young people who are always ready to be persuaded to join a group of those displaying a passionate intensity and a supposed interest in someone’s “rights.”
Rick Gordon says
Frightening! If many of these are elected to leadership positions in the future. They clearly know nothing of history, western civilization, and the culture of our ‘melting pot’.
OLD GUY says
Nor do they no anything about the evils of the past that Americans fought and die to change and to protect the American society and ideology. In my parents life time they went from the horse and buggy to a man on the moon. That is what America did, we changed the world and the standard of living world wide in a vary short period of time. With out America these young idiots would be living vary hungry and crudely.
Walter Sieruk says
There is obviously something terribly wrong with a those young people who aren’t Muslim who
nevertheless admire and support that vicious dangerous and deadly jihad entity ,Hamas. It might be that they had been deceived, as in lead astray by misinformation by the propagandists for Islam. ?
They, sadly, are confused or outright ignorant or both on the subject of Israel and the religion of Islam with its Muslim terrorist organizations.
Those people must not be aware of the wicked dangers of that demonic jihad entity, Hamas, with is jihadists, have no limits, at all, to its cruel heinous and vile horrendously horrific Islamic evils that it so maliciously and murderously commits.
Walter Sieruk says
Those young non–Muslims Americans throughout the United States, who are protesting against the State of Israel and who likewise greatly favor Hamas are people who are ,rightly , described ,as the “useful idiots” of the leaders of Hamas and their jihadist members who are dedicated to the cause of conquest for the cause of Islam.
Those Americans who aren’t Muslims the stooges of those Hamas chefs and the other Muslim terrorist, For those of Hamas view all people who are not Muslims as inferior creatures to them and refer to them .
Behind their backs as , “Kafirs,” which is the Islamic derogatory term for “disbelievers”
It’s tragic that those non-Muslims pro-Hamas America protesters against Israel are so very deluded by Hamas that this Islamic terror / murder organization so easily manipulates and uses them as their tools.
Those poor young people are ,truly, their useful idiots.
Walter Sieruk says
It’s sad and even tragic that those brainwashed young non–Muslims Americans throughout the United States, who are protesting against the State of Israel and who likewise greatly favor Hamas are people who are ,rightly , described ,as the “useful idiots” of the leaders of Hamas and their jihadist members who are dedicated to the cause of conquest for the cause of Islam.
Those Americans who aren’t Muslims the stooges of those Hamas chefs and the other Muslim terrorist, For those of Hamas view all people who are not Muslims as inferior creatures to them and refer to them .
Behind their backs as , “Kafirs,” which is the Islamic derogatory term for “disbelievers”
It’s tragic that those non-Muslims pro-Hamas America protesters against Israel are so very deluded by Hamas that this Islamic terror / murder organization so easily manipulates and uses them as their tools.
Those poor young people are ,truly, their useful idiots.
Walter Sieruk says
Little do those non- Muslim young people in America who are against Israel and hold up signs that read “Free Palestine: know or understand that history reveals that the ancient Philistines recorded in the Bible and history came from the Greek Islands and some parts of the mainland Greece. They have no connection, at all, the to the Arab /Muslim of modern times who called themselves the “Palestinians.”
From those ancient people, the Philistines, the word “Palestine” .came into being.
There is no genuine ethic group or race who are the “Palestinians.”
Early in the last century a anyone living in that land, Arab or Jew, who lived in that land was called a ”Palestinian.”
Only after 1964 did the Arab/Muslims start to refer to themselves , exclusively , by the word “Palestinian.”
The reason for that is that they felt that by giving themselves that title they would appear to have some kind of valid claim on that land.
Indeed , there never was a “Palestinian state.”
Ray Jarman says
When I think of a person’s walk through life, Whittaker Chambers comes to mind. His book, “Witness,” explains how he came to understand that there was no difference between Communism and Fascism when Stalin made his compact with Hitler. From that moment, he became a staunch believer in democracy and the American system of justice. I believe that if these students were forced to face the realities of their choices, they might actually choose differently.
The problem is that today no one seems to be held responsible for one’s actions and the lack of documented history being taught in schools. I also believe that if parents instilled a sense of consequences in their children when they are in the ages three to ten, they would grow up with respect for others as well as themselves.
Walter Sieruk says
Many young Americans who mislead and and beguiled by stealth jihadist in the US and therefore love Hamas and hate the Jewish people and the State of Israel , need to and should heed the wisdom of the former, US President, William Howard Taft, who in a speech ,rightly, declared “Antisemitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.”
Larry says
From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Debris!