What would happen if we suffered another bloody terrorist attack in the Big Apple?
I shudder to think.
Would the aftermath be filled with sorrow, heartbreak and resolve like after the barbarism of 9/11? The one healing balm in those following days, weeks, months was unity — within our own country and with the support of so many others around the world as well.
Or would it look like the days after the October 7 attacks in Israel?
Would there be a club in Brooklyn staging a demonic “Intifada fundraver” — using images of militants to advertise a festive night of dancing on the graves of more than 1,400 murder victims?
It’s a ghoulish question I had never pondered until the Williamsburg nightclub The End actually did that, hosting a Sunday dance party to raise money for Palestine and aligning it with Hamas by using the name intifada.
A recent You.gov poll doesn’t give much hope.
Conducted after the Hamas attacks in Israel, the survey found that only 32% of Americans aged 18-29 think Hamas deliberately targeted civilian areas in Israel. (It’s telling that 76% of Americans 65 and over — including those whose remember or who even fought against the Holocaust — feel that way.)
In other words, a large amount of Gen Z that doesn’t see October 7 for what it was: a bloody terrorist ambush on innocent civilians. Hamas, through rose-colored glasses.
Scores of university student associations have issued statements blaming Israel for the attacks. Many of them marched across the elite campuses, cheering the “resistance” and leaving behind a hideous stain.
At Columbia, some young people carrying Palestinian flags obscured their faces with masks or scarves, a nice cowardly touch. At UPenn, radicals chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — code for “Wipe Israel from the map.” Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia cheered the “events of yesterday” as a “step toward a free Palestine.”
Student groups at the California State University in Long Beach advertised a “Day of Resistance” rally with a poster featuring an image of a paraglider — the chosen method of invasion when Hamas ambushed an entire music festival, killing over 200 revelers. A Columbia professor called the attack “awesome” while one at Cornell described it as “exhilarating.”
In just a generation, we’ve gone from American pride to penance. We’ve “woken” up to guilt and self-loathing, the prevailing values shared by our young.
I’ll give Gen Z their due: They’re been bombarded with climate doom, had their mental health destroyed by social media and grew up under the specter of mass shootings — and the feeling that the American Dream has eluded them.
But they’re being manipulated by schools, from kindergarten through college, which have rebranded the US from Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” to an experiment gone wrong and in need of bulldozing.
Public and private schools have infused curriculum with critical race theory and anti-racist principles that proclaimed math and punctuality to be white supremacy. Worth is dictated by how high one scores on the intersectionality scale. Identity, not merit, is paramount. Equity, not equality, the goal.
As author David Bernstein wrote in his 2022 book “Woke Antisemitism: How Progressive Ideology Harms Jews“: Oppressor v. Oppressed is always the default orientation of the woke left, whose ideologies equate power with depravity, and powerlessness with virtue.”
It’s no surprise kids want a part of that virtue to flash. Political activism has replaced luxury handbags as a status symbol.
We’ve even being preached empty progressive values by corporations. Back in 2019, Nike pulled a pair of July 4 sneakers featuring a Betsy Ross flag after Colin Kaepernick reportedly found them offensive because of perceived links to slavery.
Columbus Day is now rebranded as Indigenous People’s Day to atone for the sins of an Italian man in the 15th century.
Meanwhile, colleges are dropping liberal arts programs en masse — which means kids are no longer learning foundational principles through history, literature or philosophy.
What emerges? A myopic focus on buzzwords like “colonialism” and “occupiers” without a shred of critical thinking or awareness that the entirety of human history — regardless of race, religion or region — is a story of violent conquest and empires.
Is it any wonder that a June Gallup poll found a measly 18% of 18 to 34-year-olds identify as “extremely proud” to be American?
Of course the United States is not perfect. We have our own sins, but our imperfect union is still the best in the world.
How else can one explain floods of people penetrating the Southern border, risking life and limb to come live here? And there aren’t many heading for the exit sign.
As for my question at the top of this column, I hope we never have to find out.
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