Do the Gen Z pro-Palestine protesters even know what they’re screaming, yelling, and encamping about? Definitely not.
A Columbia University student who rushed down to NYU’s campus in solidarity with protesters there said on camera that she actually had no idea what they were protesting, eventually admitting she needed to be “more educated” on the issue.
I’m sure that’s very much the case with her countless classmates donning keffiyehs and chanting anti-Israel slogans.
Forget the three r’s, these Ivy League elitists are schooled in the three i’s: ignorance, indoctrination and Instagram.
International politics are complicated, and yet Gen Z has appointed themselves as experts before even graduating from college or bothering to learn any of the details.
Diplomats, negotiators, and world leaders have failed to solve the decades-long conflict.
But don’t worry — the Zoomers have everything figured out!
When I was at Columbia during this week’s protests, I saw signs like “dykes 4 divest,” “gays for Gaza,” and “lesbians for liberation.”
These are Ivy League students with they/he pronouns, and yet they are woefully unaware of the fact that merely being gay in Gaza can amount to ten years’ prison time, according to Human Rights Watch.
I have little doubt that the vast majority of students chanting “Intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea” don’t really understand what they’re implying.
In fact when a Berkeley political science professor polled students about the chant “from the river to the sea,” he found that, while 86% of students said they supported the chant to some degree, just 47% of those supportive students were able to correctly name the river and the sea in question.
The most popular incorrect rivers were the Nile and the Euphrates.
And the most common erroneous “seas” include the the Atlantic, which is an ocean, the Dead Sea, which is a lake, and the Caribbean.
At least it is a sea.
And what are these students actually doing in the name of Palestine?
Well, at Columbia, they’re pitching expensive North Face branded tents, pairing their designer clothes with keffiyehs, gorging themselves on peanut butter and jelly, and participating in silent interpretive dance.
Is this a fight for justice — or a desperate grasp for relevance and likes?
Palestine has an intifada.
We’ve got intifaddists.
As one Jewish Columbia student described it to me, the encampment looks a whole lot like “Woodstock for antisemites.”
And my generation’s ignorance isn’t just a laughing matter.
Some misguided Zoomers hold legitimately heinous views.
When fellow Post reporter Jon Levine and I talked to masked NYU student protesters gathering on campus on Wednesday night, they both implied that Israel should not exist and justified the atrocities of October 7th.
One NYU undergraduate student, who told us his name was Dylan, confidently declared that, “The state of Israel has no right to exist.”
He also justified the killing of 1,200 people in Israel on October 7th.
“When you perpetrate a genocide for over 75 years and you refuse any other means of people resisting those extremely violent policies, people will take up arms to resist against their occupiers,” he said.
My generation has been force-fed narratives about the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy by their far-left educators and their culture, and as a result are used to looking at the world through the lens of good and evil.
Today, radical professors tell students what to think — and have completely abdicated their responsibility to teach kids how to think.
As a result, we’ve churned out a generation which is more activated than educated.
And that simplistic neo-Marxist narrative blinds them to the possibility that the conflict between Palestine and Israel could be anything more complex than the “good guys” and the “bad guys” respectively.
Pair that with the fact that nearly half of Zoomers say they get their news from TikTok (where Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” went viral because so many young people were praising it), and you have a disaster on your hands.
They don’t know the truth about Israel, Gaza and Hamas and they can’t be bothered to check.
But they get likes!
The reaction to war in Israel over the past several months is a wake-up call.
Young people have always been progressive and idealist, and this generation is no exception.
Except, thanks to social media and the politicization of our education, we’re also indoctrinated — and woefully misinformed too.
