Young Americans: kill all Israelis

No, young Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 didn’t put this sanguinary desideratum in quite so many words. Yet in a recent Harvard-Harris poll, 51 per cent of them said they believed the long-term answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.”

Even young (an adjective I use interchangeably with ‘silly’) people must realise what would happen to the Israeli Jews as a result. If they don’t, the events of 7 October should give them an accurate idea.

Currently, there are over seven million Jews in Israel. Assuming that a million or so would be able to get out in the nick of time, some six million would be slaughtered. Does the numeral sound familiar?

Actually, I shouldn’t accuse those youngsters of an inability to anticipate obvious consequences. Over 58 per cent of them agreed that “Hamas would like to commit genocide against the Jews in Israel.” That understanding, however, proved no hindrance to their response.

An additional 32 per cent believed in a two-state solution, which means arriving at the same outcome slightly more slowly. Or do they think that, if Hamas turned into, say, Hamasia or Hamastan, it would become better-disposed towards Jews?

Considering that only four per cent of Americans aged 65 and over felt Israel should be ended, my argument in favour of raising the voting age at least to 25, better still 30, got a tremendous boost. Anyone who casts a ballot assumes a political responsibility, and I’d think it axiomatic that responsibilities should only ever be given to responsible people. Yet all 2,034 respondents were registered voters.

Also, 60 per cent of the youngsters said Hamas’s terrorist raid was “justified by the grievance of Palestinians”, a view shared by 27 per cent of Americans overall. Quite. A craving for a two-state solution and a grievance against those who oppose it justify raping and murdering Israeli girls, not always in that order.

Commenting on the poll, Sen. Roger Marshall said: “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America.”

Well, yes, sure, those terrorists hate America, but it’s a long-distance hatred, more or less abstract. The target of their concrete, immediate hatred is Israel in particular and Jews in general. I’m sure those young Americans didn’t ponder Hamas’s anti-Americanism too deeply. No, they cast their murderous vote because they too hate Israel and Jews.

Before I let older Americans off the hook, 37 per cent of them said it was Israel that was committing genocide, which means over a third of all Americans don’t even know what the word means. Sixty per cent of the youngsters agreed, and 53 per cent added that therefore no one should be punished for supporting the “genocide of Jews”.

This is what’s called ‘liberalism’ in America and elsewhere. A liberal is these days someone who thinks people should be punished for using a wrong personal pronoun but not for advocating the murder of millions of people, provided they are Jews.

I’ve never had any first-hand experience of the American educational system, and even my second-hand involvement with it is several decades out of date. Yet this poll is sufficient to suggest it’s failing. Oh, I’m sure enough young Americans emerge into the outside world armed to the teeth with an ability to programme a computer, calculate compounded interest, and manipulate share prices.

It’s in the area of the humanities that American education seems wanting. For it’s the humanities that should inculcate into youngsters the moral and philosophical fundamentals of our civilisation. As a minimum, they ought to learn – with apologies to Kipling – that liberalism is liberalism, fascism is fascism, and never the twain should meet.

In fact, while today’s fascism isn’t becoming any more liberal, today’s liberalism is becoming more and more fascistic. This isn’t a case of the opposites attracting, which cliché defies both common sense and empirical observation.

If the opposites attract, they aren’t really opposites. However dissimilar they may be on the outside, their cores overlap on some fundamental premises or – in the case of today’s liberalism and fascism – common genealogy.

What we are observing is Enlightenment chickens coming home to roost, except that on closer examination those fluffy creatures turn out to be birds of prey tearing to shreds the spiritual flesh of the West. This season is a good time to remind ourselves of some home truths, one of which is that, without Christianity, the West is a rudderless ship cast adrift. Sooner or later it’ll crash against the rocks, and there will be no survivors.

If you don’t believe any of these melancholy musings, take another look at the poll under examination. Over half of all young voters in the leading nation of the West see nothing wrong with a Holocaust Mark II. Moreover, they don’t think that agitating for it should in any way be curtailed.

Not that I suggest for one second that a similar poll would yield different results in Britain, France or Holland. The problem isn’t national but civilisational – and also, I believe, physiological.

It’s not for nothing that throughout recorded history, societies have had councils of elders, but not councils of youngsters. It’s only various hues of fascism, red, brown or these days ‘liberal’, that take their lead from barely post-pubescent boys and girls. (Have you listened to Greta Thunberg lately?)

Trotsky, the guru of the European Left, knew where the constituency for his brand of fascism could be found. “The youth,” he said, “is the barometer of a nation”. Nowadays, it’s not only the barometer but also the navigator, unerringly charting a route to perdition.

Paedocracy, I often repeat, is much more damaging than its more popular cognate. This poll shows just how damaging it can be. It also shows other things, wider, deeper and scarier. But with carols playing and Christmas trees lit-up, now isn’t the right time to think of them.