Pro-Hamas Support Among Young Americans is Troubling

Written by Daniel Horowitz

The pandemic taught us that a stunning number of Americans would deprive their fellow citizens of their rights or even consign them to their deaths if they disagreed with the prevailing “scientific” narrative. To refuse the so-called vaccine was to invite all manner of vitriol and abuse — “Denier!” “Grandma killer!” — even if the accusers had availed themselves of such amazing protection. If that weren’t bad enough, some Democrats even called for murder charges against those who refused to wear a mask.

Now we learn that a stunning number of Americans — not foreign students, Americans — would gladly celebrate the massacre of Jews for simply existing in their biblical homeland.

The generation coming of age may be the most gullible in our history. In an age of geopolitical lies, from the lies of COVID to control our bodies and the lies surrounding the death of George Floyd to demonize whites and criminalize police work to the lie of January 6 to criminalize political dissent, young Americans have accepted all of those lies as truths.

They believed those lies with a level of zeal matched only by the zeal of jihad itself. Now comes their support for that very jihad.

We’ve seen some very troubling polling data about the sentiments of many Muslims living in America. According to Cygnal, 57 percent say the Hamas massacre of October 7 was justified. But more disturbing are the results of a comprehensive Harvard-Harris poll showing that young Americans have no sense of morality or history regarding the Middle East. Asked whether they thought Hamas was justified in killing over 1,200 civilians because of its “grievances,” 76 percent of Americans of all ages said they believed the killings were not justified. That’s the good news.

But the overwhelming majority of the people representing that supermajority are getting older. The trajectory of the generations is shocking:

As you can see, a slim majority of Americans under 25, and nearly a majority of those under 35, believed Hamas was justified in carrying out the massacre. Something went seriously wrong with our education system and our churches after Generation X. A majority of Generation Z, the generation born between 1997 and 2013, appears to believe that the mass torture, rape, and mutilation of Israelis, most of whom were largely peaceniks and pro-Gaza activists, was justified!

How is it that the younger generation can be so immoral? Their secular worldview allows them to blindly champion every media blood libel imaginable. The same people who believed the unmasked harmed those who were masked, that George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis cop, and that January 6 was a planned coup to overthrow the government also believe the blood libels against Israel. Shockingly, even after the Gaza hospital story was thoroughly disproven — the hospital is still standing; an Islamic Jihad rocket failed and exploded in an adjacent parking lot — the overwhelming majority of Gen Z, and even the majority of Americans under 45, continued to believe the hospital was hit by an Israeli airstrike.

No wonder why so many Palestinian rallies are full of people wearing masks. They believe everything put out by the media. It is this same dangerous naïveté that leads nearly half of young Americans to believe Hamas is seeking peace rather than the destruction of Israel.

One would expect all Americans to share the sentiments of those over 65, but we are not America any more. War is peace and peace is war.

These polling numbers harmonize with the findings of a CNN poll taken immediately after the Hamas massacre, which found that just 27% of Gen Z believed Israel’s military actions were justified, compared to 81 percent of seniors who said the same.

We are facing a grave crisis of values among our youth, and the trajectory will only get worse with time. Baby Boomers came of age in the 1960s under the banner of “question authority.” There isn’t an authority Gen Z would question. They worship technology, and the information on their phones is their new Bible. Social media is their new church, and universities are their new training camp.

Gen X parents are now spending a fortune sending their kids to universities so they can become pro-Hamas activists. Just how deep does the dogma reside in the hearts of those educating our youth? This week, 1,700 sociology professors signed an open letter accusing Israel of “genocide” and saying Hamas terror must be “contextualized” as a response to “75 years of settler colonial occupation and European empire.”

We are funding the suicide of our civilization via student loans to the tune of $1.8 trillion. It’s long past time federal funding of universities came to an end. Red-state legislatures would do well to follow Florida’s path and make their public university systems comport with the values of the majority of parents and voters. Leftist professors will howl about violations of their academic freedom. They can exercise their academic freedom by teaching elsewhere.

Thanks to social media and compulsory miseducation, if our younger generation were its own country, it would be as communist as the most far-left European country. The scary thing is that one day it will be its own country — ours.

Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of TheBlaze and host of the Conservative Review podcast. He writes on the most decisive battleground issues of our times, including the theft of American sovereignty through illegal immigration, the theft of American liberty through tyranny, and the theft of American law and order through criminal justice “reform.”