Few things are discussed with a greater combination of certainty and ignorance than the Middle East.
I’ve written about this many times over the years. But now, as supposedly knowledgeable/educated students march with their palestinian flags, and, like the trained, conditioned acolytes they are, chant slogans fed to them by people with agendas and megaphones, it takes on an especially significant meaning.
With the above in mind, here is the beginning of Ron E. Hassner’s sad, pathetic, but not at all surprising article for the Wall Street Journal:
When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
In other words, assuming this admittedly small sample holds true for the general population of college students (and I would bet body parts it does), when it comes to the Middle East they are a bunch of ignoramuses being led by the nose and made fools of…to the detriment of anyone who actually cares about facts and reality.
FYI: about a month ago I contacted our local Board of Education, the regional Board of Education, our congressperson and the governor of our state, suggesting that, as a matter of current events, middle school and high school students should be asked to read the hamas covenant (which would take maybe 15 minutes) and discuss it in class.
Let them see with their own eyes what hamas put in writing – not after October 7th, but in 1988, 35 years ago, it should be noted – about their aims regarding Israel, Jews in general, and the so-called “two state solution” politicians talk about as if hamas had even the slightest intention of considering it.
I have yet to hear of this being implemented. Not by our local Board of Education or by the Regional Board of Education. And I have yet to hear that our congressperson or our governor has suggested it.
So, yes, I will contact them – maybe a little more animatedly this time – to suggest it again.
I’ll let you know what, if anything, I accomplish….
….but, though I certainly hope to be surprised in the positive, I would lie to say I expect an acceptable result.
