American Youth Are Increasingly Indifferent to Jewish Suffering and Sympathetic to an Ancient Evil

Isaac SchorrOct 10th, 2023, 1:04 pm
 

AP Photo/Stephan Savoia

America’s youth are increasingly ignorant of and indifferent toward the suffering of the Jewish people.

In the days since terrorists launched a barbaric attack in southern Israel that included the mass kidnapping, rape, and murder of Israeli civilians, university student organizations across the country have banded together to commit what they they would normally consider to be a mortal sin: Victim-blaming.

At Harvard University, 31 student organizations signed onto a joint statement declaring that “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

At the University of California, Berkeley another coalition of student groups signed onto a statement celebrating both this latest and past acts of terrorism. “We display our unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza and the broader occupied Palestinian lands,” it read. “Glory to Palestine, glory to the resistance, and glory to our martyrs.”

Students for Justice in Palestine, meanwhile, is calling for a “national day of resistance” on campuses around the country Thursday to celebrate “a historic win” that “shatters the illusion of Israel.”

“The zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive,” declared Hamas’ accomplices in America.

The organizations chapter at the University of Virginia, meanwhile, asserted that last weekend’s events left them “hopeful” because they were a “a step towards a free Palestine.”

Such utterances — laced as they are with overtly anti-Semitic propositions and implicit endorsements of violence — are typical of progressive college student organizations. Sadly, such moral incoherence is as predictable as it is sinister.

What’s come as more of shock, as Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers observed, is the fecklessness of the literal adults in the room, university administrators.

Harvard’s leadership team had not weighed in on the violence as of Monday evening, when it at last released a communiqué at the urging of Summers and others. And when that did come, it failed to meet “the needs of the moments,” as Summers argued.

“Why can’t we find anything approaching the moral clarity of Harvard statements after George Floyd’s death or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?” he wondered.

Other elite institutions like Yale released statements eschewing condemnations of evil for generalized laments about “the violence” and “loss of life,” effectively pardoning those responsible for said violence, loss of life, and much, much worse.

Still others, so eager to get a word in, so eager to earn their place on the right side of history in other instances of injustice, fell completely and conspicuously silent.

Perhaps some university helms have genuinely been seized by morally blind revolutionaries or even outright anti-Semites. It’s far more likely, however, that these guilty bureaucrats fear the reaction of their worst students to any real acknowledgement of the forces (anti-Semitism, radical Islamist ideology) and actors (Hamas, Arab leaders, and yes, much of the Palestinian population) responsible for the medieval war crimes being committed in Israel.

To be unequivocal in their statements and reject the false nuance demanded by so many in the media, academia, and Washington, D.C. would be to invite the wrath of students who celebrate modern pogroms. How those students might respond — if provoked by the truth — could invite a public relations nightmare or even violence.

In other words: American youth have turned the tolerance of evil into the path of least resistance.

The militant strain of anti-Semitism on campus is also the cause of average Americans’ increasing misperception of state of play in the Middle East. According to an astonishing new YouGov survey, just 32% of Americans between the ages of  18 and 29 are aware that Hamas is deliberately striking Israeli civilian areas.

Just 32% believe their lying eyes that Jewish babies are being beheaded. Just 32% believe their lying eyes that Jewish children are being burned alive. Just 32% believe their lying eyes that Jewish women are being held, humiliated, and raped.

If they profess not to see the carnage as it stares them straight in the face, then they’ve already succumbed to an ancient evil equally as dehumanizing as Jew-hatred — apathy to it.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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