A Lost Generation

Everyone who is not comatose despairs about Gen Z. Not only do they not know how to read, write or count, but they manifest an appalling lack of moral sense.

They have learned to resent anyone who outperforms and to sympathize with anyone who underperforms. They are wallowing in grievance and have become caricatures of themselves.

A sensible moral soul would have been outraged at the October 7 Hamas massacre of innocent Israeli women and children. Such a soul would have understood that Israel had the right to retaliate against an invasion. America’s elderly held that general opinion.

And yet, American young people have appallingly chosen to side with Hamas, a terrorist organization whose tactics do not include wealth production and poverty reduction.

The New York Post reports on a new poll:

A majority of young Americans said they believe Israel should “be ended and given to Hamas,” according to a shocking poll.

The survey, conducted THIS WEEK by Harvard-Harris polling, found 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.”

You read that right. Young Americans want to destroy the state of Israel and to give it all to the Palestinians. Of course, they believed that the October 7 attack was justified. That is, they blamed it on the Israelis, who had it coming:

A full 60% of the same demographic said Hamas’ Oct 7 terrorist attack could be “justified by the grievance of Palestinians” — a position held by just 27% of Americans overall….

A full 67% of 18-24 year olds said they believed Jews “should be treated as oppressors” — a position which 73% of Americans disagreed with and called a “false ideology.”

One notes, with chagrin, that young people do not bother any more to say that they are merely against Zionism. They are all-in with Jew-hatred, even for those who are not Zionists.

Those of us who believed that college students were being indoctrinated and brainwashed are not surprised. We are appalled and horrified, but certainly not shocked.  So we feel compelled to shine some light into the darkness of their lost minds.

Who better to fulfill that task than Bill Maher. Presumably, he will not be speaking at a level that these young fools can easily dismiss.

Take the town of Bethlehem, a place that has a vital importance to  Christians. 

… the little town of Bethlehem was “86% Christian” in 1950 and how today it’s “overwhelmingly Muslim.”

“And that’s my point tonight: Things change,” Maher said. “To 2.3 billion Christians, there could be no more sacred site than where their savior was born, but they don’t have it anymore. 

He continued, that there are no crusades to recover it:

And yet no crusader army has geared up to take it back. Things change- countries, boundaries, empires. Palestine was under the Ottoman Empire for 400 years but today, an Ottoman is something you’ve put under your feet.”

And then, Maher continued, Palestinians and their sympathizers assert their right to grievance by saying that when Israel was founded, any number of them were forced out-- perhaps to live in the Palestinian state called Jordan:

“Was it unjust that even a single Arab family was forced to move upon the founding of the Jewish State? Yes, but it’s also not rare. Happening all through history all over the world. And mostly what people do is make the best of it,” Maher said. 

In the course of human history such displacements have hardly been exceptional:

After World War II, 12 million ethnic Germans got shoved out of Russia and Poland and Czechoslovakia because Germany had become kind of unpopular. A million Greeks were shut out of Turkey in 1923, a million Ghanaians out of Nigeria in 1983, almost a million French out of Algeria in 1962, nearly a million Syrian refugees moved to Germany eight years ago. Was that a perfect fit?

As for the horrors that supposedly were committed by colonizing Jews, those who trot out the argument forget that history has provided us with numerous examples of colonization:

“History is brutal, and humans are not good people. History’s sad and full of wrongs but you can’t make them unhappen because a paraglider isn’t a time machine. People get moved, and yes, colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century. And they didn’t do it by asking,” Maher said.

This notion that Palestinians are going to retake the land that is now called Israel foments false hope. Besides, the country that exists now was built by Israelis, not by Palestinians. Didn’t Heraclitus say that you cannot step foot in the same river twice? Well you cannot return to things as they were when they are no longer as they were. And there is no way, according to the evidence, that Hamas-followers could build or sustain anything resembling modern Israel.

Besides, Maher continued, Palestinians have consistently refused to sign a peace treaty with Israel:

“The Palestinian people should know your leaders and the useful idiots on college campuses who are their allies are not doing any favors by keeping alive the ‘river to the sea’ myth. I mean, where do you think Israel is going? Spoiler alert: nowhere,” Maher said. 

“It’s one of the most powerful countries in the world with a $500 billion economy, the world’s second-largest tech sector after Silicon Valley and nuclear weapons. They’re here, they like their bagel with a schmear, getting used to it.”

Now, in the best of circumstances the Palestinians and the Israelis would negotiate something resembling a peace. Unfortunately, the Palestinian side refuses to negotiate anything:

But war ends through negotiation. And what the media glosses over is it’s hard to negotiate when the other side’s bargaining position is ‘You will die and disappear.’ I mean, the chant ‘From the river to the sea?’ Yeah, let’s look at the map.”

“If I give you the benefit of the doubt and say your plan for a completely-Jewless Palestine isn’t that all the Jews should die, what is the only other option? They move. You move all the Jews… Where are we moving this entire country, Texas? Sure they have room. I guess we could put the Wailing Wall on the border and kill two birds with one stone. Or we could just get serious.”