Tomorrow belongs to them (gulp)
The oldest hatred mutates again, this time for the age of intersectionality.
There’s an old, tiresome cliche about how grownups have completely screwed up everything in the world, but that better days are on he horizon, once they’ve all died off and the more enlightened next generation finally takes over. Enlightened members of the silent generation said it about the Boomers, progressive Boomers say it about the Millennials, and the Millennials will eventually say it about Gen Y or Gen Alpha or whatever we’re calling the next population cohort.
Gen X is overlooked as usual, and we’re kind of cool with that.
In real life, of course, there’s no guarantee the next generation are actually more progressive than their ancestors, nor is there any guarantee that being “progressive” actually means they’ll do anything good with it.
China let the young people run pretty much everything from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, and all they got for it was millions of dead and psychologically scarred people, economic ruin from which the country didn’t recover until it abandoned Communism in all but name, and copyrighting the rules for Ivy League disciplinary proceedings.
In some recent European elections, far-right parties did unexpectedly well with young voters. Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, another extreme right-wing organization by almost any definition is disturbingly popular with the youth - and I don’t mean Donald Trump’s campaign:
Approximately one in five college students nationwide sympathize with Hamas, an amount nearly equal to those supporting Israel amid the war, according to a new survey.
The survey conducted by Intelligent.com revealed 22% of the 609 college students surveyed feel compassion for the terrorist group. Meanwhile, 26% are sympathizing with the Israeli government.
It’s one thing to have sympathy for the Palestinians in general - you know my feelings on the conflict, but I’d be a complete monster to have no sympathy for their plight at all - and another to back an explicitly genocidal theocratic death cult.
William Saletan at The Bulwark dug into the numbers, and thinks youth support for Hamas might be overstated somewhat. That’s the good news, though even “only” 15-20 percent of 18-24s explicitly backing them - heck, even just five percent supporting Hamas - would be disturbing enough.
These are eye-popping numbers, but there are reasons to be skeptical. The Harvard/Harris poll is somewhat sloppy, its November tables still haven’t been released, and the pollster hasn’t responded to requests for the data. Also, in the same survey in which 58 percent of under-25s said the October 7 attack could be justified, 54 percent said “universities have a moral obligation to condemn the Hamas terrorist killings.” So it’s not clear what some of these respondents are thinking.
Other polls have reported much lower numbers in this age range. In a Generation Lab survey taken a week after October 7, two-thirds of college students called the attack terrorism; only 12 percent described it instead as a justified act of resistance. Another poll, taken in late October, found that among college students aged 18 to 22, 9 percent said they sympathized “a lot” with Hamas, and another 13 percent said they sympathized “a little.”
All in all, sympathy with Hamas seems to show up, on average, in about 15 percent to 20 percent of young American adults. That’s way too high. But keep three things in perspective. First, the most reliable polls indicate that even in this age group, the vast majority of respondents oppose or at least don’t support Hamas. Second, there’s a huge gap between sympathy with Palestinians, which is quite broadly shared in the younger cohort, and sympathy with Hamas, which isn’t. And third, there’s a big gap between young people’s feelings about the Israeli government and their feelings about the Israeli people.
And now the bad news:
The post-October 7 polls tell us a few things. First, younger Americans are a lot less worried about antisemitism than older Americans are. In the Pew survey, under-30s, unlike any other age cohort, were more likely to express a great deal of concern about the possibility of “increasing violence against Muslim people in the U.S.” than to express such concern about increasing violence against Jews. Likewise, in a December Economist/YouGov poll, under-30s were more likely to say that hate crimes against Muslims were a serious problem in this country than to say the same about hate crimes against Jews. (This runs contrary to recent data on hate crimes against Jews and Muslims.) When under-30s were asked about “antisemitism” and about discrimination against Muslims, again, they were more likely to describe the latter as a serious problem than to say the same about antisemitism.
You could argue that these polls show heightened concern for Muslims, not indifference toward Jews. But that theory can’t explain other findings in the Economist poll. For example, American adults as a whole disagreed (51 to 16 percent) with the proposition that “Jews have too much power in America.” But under-30s were closely divided: 28 percent strongly agreed or tended to agree with that proposition, while 35 percent strongly disagreed or tended to disagree.
The poll also asked whether “the Holocaust has been exaggerated.” Overall, the respondents overwhelmingly said no: 74 percent disagreed with the statement; only 9 percent agreed. Among the under-30s, 52 percent also disagreed with the statement. But 23 percent of under-30s agreed with it.
The persistence of the age gap on questions that go beyond Israel and Palestine—questions about hate crimes, antisemitic tropes, and the Holocaust—shows that young Americans aren’t just more sensitive than their elders to the plight of Palestinians. They’re also more skeptical of and less sensitive to the plight of Jews. Compared to older generations, younger Americans are less likely to see Jews as victims and more likely to see Jews as bullies.
These views don’t represent a majority of the rising generation. But they’re a sign of danger ahead—not just for Israelis, but for Jews.
Saletan later tweeted out the results of another poll, showing that a decades-long project to reclassify Jews as “white,” and therefore oppressors, appears to be paying off:
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