Gen Z’s course load of rubbish
University protesters indoctrinated, ignorant, or just in it for the ‘likes’
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 admitted 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.
Self-appointed experts
International politics are complicated, yet Gen Z has appointed themselves as experts before 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 this week, I saw signs like “dykes for divestment,” “gays for Gaza” and “lesbians for liberation.”
These are Ivy League students with they/he pronouns, yet they are woefully unaware that merely being gay in Gaza can amount to 10 years of 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% said they supported the chant, just 47% of them 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 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 doing in the name of Palestine? At Columbia, they’re pitching expensive North Face tents, pairing their designer clothes with keffiyehs, gorging themselves on peanut butter and jelly and joining 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.”
Activated, not educated
And my generation’s ignorance isn’t just a laughing matter. When Post reporter Jon Levine and I talked to masked NYU students gathering on campus Wednesday night, some of the Zoomers expressed heinous views.
One undergrad declared that, “The state of Israel has no right to exist” and justified the killing of 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7.
“When you perpetrate a genocide for over 75 years . . . people will take up arms to resist against their occupiers,” he said.
My generation has been forcefed narratives by their far-left educators and culture and are used to looking at the world through the lens of good and evil.
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.”
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 that is more activated than educated.
Pair that with half of Zoomers saying they get their news from TikTok (where Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” went viral), and you have a disaster.
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 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 politicization of our education, this generation is also indoctrinated and woefully misinformed.