An Insane Number of Gen Zers Support Hamas’s Slaughter of Innocent Israelis | Opinion
Gen Z is really not okay.
As the world continues to process the horrors of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli that left 1,300 dead and thousands more injured and the horrors of the ensuing war in Gaza, young Americans are coming to vastly different conclusions about the situation than… well, anyone else. A new Harvard-Harris poll asked Americans what they think about the Hamas-Israel conflict, and the results sharply diverged along generational lines.
Overall, Americans overwhelmingly support Israel over Hamas. A whopping 84 percent of respondents told pollsters they favored Israel, while just 16 percent favored Hamas. Among older Americans over 65, an astounding 95 percent supported Israel, and just 5 percent said their sympathies lie with Hamas. But among young people age 18 to 24, things looked quite differently.
Just 52 percent of this group said they supported Israel, while 48 percent said they supported Hamas. Yes, that’s right: Nearly half of young respondents said they side with the terrorist group that just earlier this month purposefully targeted and slaughtered innocent civilians, including women, children, and infants, in a chilling and sadistic manner.
You’d hope for the sake of the future of our country that these young people are somehow supporting Hamas despite the group’s violent actions. But you’d be wrong. In an even more shocking finding, the Harvard-Harris poll revealed that 51 percent of 18 to 24 year olds said Hamas’s violence against Israeli civilians was justified, while just 49 percent don’t think so.
Here’s where things get… strange. In the same poll, 62 percent of young respondents agree that what Hamas did to Israel was “genocidal.” So, a hefty chunk of young people in this country believe that genocide against Israeli civilians is justified. What the hell?
It should go without saying—but apparently it doesn’t—that no matter how much one sympathizes with the plight of Palestinian people, it is still wrong to slaughter concert goers and burn their bodies. It is still wrong to kill entire families huddled in their bomb shelters. And it is still wrong to murder babies.
All human life is precious. While civilians inevitably are inadvertedly killed as a consequence of war, purposefully targeting them is universally considered a war crime. It’s never morally acceptable to intentionally kill innocent people, no matter who does it. The fact that so many young Americans’ moral compass are so distorted that they no longer understand this basic moral truth is deeply disturbing.
It also raises an important question. How the hell did we get here?
This is not normal. Such a moral perversion is not an organic belief that naturally emerges among decent people. On the contrary, it’s in large part the consequence of a corrosive and malevolent “social justice” ideology that’s being spoon-fed to young Americans on college campuses.
In this depraved worldview, which Elon Musk has dubbed the “woke mind virus,” the world is divided into two groups of people: oppressors and oppressed. Black people, for example, are oppressed in America. So, under this lens, Black Americans cannot be racist: They can only be victims of racism.
Meanwhile, “misgendering” someone is violence, even though it doesn’t actually involve any violence. Actual violence in response to this speech is justified as “self-defense.”
Truth, and therefore morality, is subjective, in this worldview. Hence the normalization of the innocuous-sounding but actually Orwellian phrase “my truth,” “your truth,” or “his truth.”
This heierarchy-obssessed perspective does not actually describe reality. In the real world, there are shades of grey. People can be both oppressed in some ways and oppressing others. (Just ask gay people how they’re faring in Gaza.) The truth is that almost no one in human history has been 100 percent good or 100 percent bad, 100 percent victim or 100 percent villain.
The “social justice” narrative, in its black-and-white worldview, is actually the inverse of the old, regressive worldview it supposedly rose up to eradicate, that similarly erroneously drew absolutist distinctions between groups of people based on their membership in immutable categories.
Yet rather than reject both extremes, some subscribers to modern social justice ideology have become the mirror image of what they hate. And that’s how you end up in the perverse situation where so many of your adherents can view the genocide of Jews as “justified.”
In their telling, Jews are privileged and the Palestinians are oppressed. For some entrapped by this hollow thinking, the analysis genuinely stops there.
Just look at the Black Lives Matter chapter that responded to October 7 attacks by showing “solidarity” with the Palestinians, not Israel, and even positively depicting the hang gliders that were used by Hamas terrorists to kill civilians. All politics aside, such a bizarre and tone-deaf statement only emerges from an organization that has substituted the woke “mind virus” for rational thinking.
Young people have absorbed this kind of perverse messaging from the cultural and institutional forces they look to. They’re told the slaughter of civilians is actually “freedom fighting” by a “resistance” seeking to cast of the shackles of its oppressors. And who are young, white, affluent Americans—who’ve been told for years how privileged they are and how incapable that renders them to perceive the world—to question the “truth” of an oppressed people?
That’s how we end up with half of young people nodding along to genocide. It’s the radical result of years of miseducation in an ideology that’s as morally bankrupt as the old bigotry it rose up to replace.
Source » msn.com
