— Feature, Musings —10.28.2023 12:20 PM
My latest: the social media sewer
Places of higher learning?
Places that are stomach-churning, more like.
We refer to campuses all over North America, of course. Since October 7, far too many students at university, college and high school campuses have blamed Hamas’ victims, not Hamas. They have promoted hatred, not opposed hatred.
On Wednesday, thousands of students at more than 100 universities across the United States and Canada protested “fascists and Zionists,” said the World Socialist Web Site.
In Canada, police were called in to escort Jewish students at McGill University, away from a big anti-Israel protest. Security has been enhanced to protect Jewish students at three British Columbia universities: UBC, Simon Fraser and U Vic.
Three York University students’ associations published pro-Hamas statements, and refused to retract, even after it was pointed out that Hamas raped, tortured and murdered more than 1,400 Jews – and kidnapped hundreds more. Thursday, hundreds of high school students walked out of classes across the Toronto District School Board to wave Palestinian flags and attack the Jewish state.
And this short summary doesn’t even include the multiple death threats and assaults that have been happening on campuses across North America – motivated by Jew-hatred.
Why is this happening?
Bad parenting, possibly. Hateful professors and instructors, to be sure. But, more than any other factor, Generation Z – that is, those born in 1996 and later – are being targeted by anti-Semitic and extremist organizations online. And the statistics tell the disturbing story.
• According to a poll conducted by Harvard University (which itself has had no shortage of anti-Semitic student activity), more than 50 per cent of Americans between 18 and 24 believe Hamas’ pogroms were “justified.”
• Where are those young people getting their information? From the Chinese-regime-run TikTok. TikTok is the search engine they use, more than Google or any other. The European Union, unlike Canada, has demanded this week that TikTok detail the efforts they are making to curb pro-Hamas propaganda. So far, TikTok hasn’t responded.
• When one U.S. researcher engaged with just one TikTok post on the Israel-Hamas war, his feed was almost immediately overwhelmed with anti-Israel messages. He looked at the resulting data, and found that “TikTok is being controlled by anti-Israel bot farms – much of which is paid for by Hamas-supporting organizations.”
• If you look even deeper, you can see why Israel is losing the information war among young people. Among the ever-important hashtags, for example, “Stand With Israel” got two million views. Meanwhile, “StandWithPalestine” got an extraordinary 37.7 million – almost twenty times as many.
• It gets worse: because TikTok is now so overwhelmingly anti-Israel, its engagement flywheel – which online platforms use to increase momentum and profit – encourages more and more anti-Semitic content to attract eyeballs.
This, perhaps more than anything else, helps to explain why white, affluent, under-educated high school students who have never set foot in Israel – from San Francisco to Toronto – have embraced extremist messages. Their primary source of news and information is a sewer pipe for Jew-hatred.
This writer has written in the past that TikTok needs to be banned in the West because it has been shown to be a tool used by the Chinese regime to destabilize democracy. It is a real and present danger.
So too, now, with our young people. Right now, the minds of our youth are being poisoned with toxic, hateful messaging – messages that are deeply and unabashedly anti-Semitic. Not enough is being done to counter it.
The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, once said this: “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which [we] can play.”
Well, the press has since been replaced by TikTok and its ilk. It has been replaced by digital devices which every single Gen Z kid carries with them.
And it is like a snake, spitting lies and hate.
Warren,
Those people, and I use the term loosely, need to be forced to watch the atrocities and crimes against humanity that Hamas committed. But for Hamas’ actions, they would still be in control of Gaza without Israel responding as she did. Hamas did this to THEMSELVES, period.
Meanwhile, the higher power is watching and will judge each of us in our individual lives on how we either met this moment, or quite deliberately failed to. Good is good, evil is evil and it won’t be very pretty going forward in so many individual lives. You reap what you sow as so many people are about to find out.
I honestly will never understand all the driving out of one’s lane with this stuff.
Student Leaders: Your job is to advocate for better learning conditions for your student body. Exams.
Study areas. Dorm conditions. Smaller class sizes. That’s it. That’s all.
Union Leaders: Your job is to advocate for better working conditions for your employees. Overtime. Health and Safety. Vacation. That’s it. That’s all.
Parent groups: Your job is to advocate for better learning conditions for your children. Safer school bus stops. Playground safety. Organizing the local sock hop. That’s it. That’s all.
Provincial MPPs: Your job is to advocate for better health care, education and regional transportation for your constituents. That’s it. That’s all.
Your views on international affairs are just as impactful as everyone else’s. Which is to say… Not very impactful at all.
Here’s a tip: Canada has an entire bureaucracy infinitely more knowledgeable and focused on the facts than you will ever hope to be. Listen to what they have to say.
More focus on the things you are actually responsible for will lead to better education, healthcare, working conditions, regional transportation etc. Yelling and screaming and writing antagonistic / provocative social media posts is helping no one.
A 24-hour news cycle that’s violence-based will always yield more hatred. In the end, this affects me not one whit, but I’d like to not support the bad guys.
I think a lot of folks are scared of the ideas that humans kill each other over, and the religious debate here, and the land battle over Palestine, are something we’re all expected to take a side over. And the jobs you list above aren’t all we expect from those people, from those groups.
We also expect them to be champions for the right side of history; we’ve sought out sycophants for people on the ‘wrong side’ enough in the past 20 years that some of these guys are running rear-guard to ensure they won’t wind up at the Nuremburg trials of Twitter in the days to come. :/
Really? I don’t expect my City Councilor to be a “Champion for the Right Side of history”. I expect them to fix the f#&king pot holes.
As I noted elsewhere, look how this ended. They did a 100% reversal in one week.
https://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/news/local-news/city-council-rejects-support-of-israel-resolution
Politics is a turkey in every pot on election day. Council
can’t deny constituency their turkeys and they must have
realized that before they pivoted to ‘progressive’ benevolence once again, eh.
Was all good until I got to here:
“Canada has an entire bureaucracy”
That’s for sure.
I’ve been countering anti-Semitic behaviour online
Internet for well over two decades. Anti-social media
must include the entirety of American anti-social media.
I follow a few right-wing blogs that spew hatemongering rhetoric daily and I’ve never made
even the slightest dent in terms of educating the mindless partisan zealots that occupy the mainstay of
these blogs that I read.
Hatemongering partisan zealots cannot be taught
to reason whatsoever. They are reflexively hateful
and they enjoy promulgating hate towards ethnicity
that is not right-wing, gun toting and extremist in
terms of a lack of education.
Only the uneducated promulgate hate. And uneducated right-wingers on American blogs are the absolute worst of the bunch.
Hamas must be eliminated entirely before they obtain enough of an edge to strike Israel once again. The solution is simple in terms of the antagonists.
Once Hamas is eliminated entirely it’s doubtful that
high school students in Toronto will be waving flags
of support for terrorism & terrorists that engage in genocide.
And we can blame CUPE & the NDP for much of the hatemongering we are evidencing via news media reports. Teachers’ unions are advocating the hatemongering via student populations throughout
Canada. Their agenda of opposition to any and all
religiosity of Christianity is obvious and evident via their instruction of students under their tutelage.
Hate engenders more hate and kinetic hot conflagration. That’s what the CUPE union stands for.
Re the U of T students stand with Palestine.
Standing with the same Palestinians who throw gays off the top of buildings?
Wold the so called progressives who support the Palestinians, please call on Hamas to release its supplies of food and medical supplies stockpiled in Hamas tunnels?
https://twitter.com/alanfryermedia/status/1718345103906070707?
Aside from the singular event of 7. October, and aside from the ability to hang the name of “anti-semitism” around the neck of this ethic, I’m really finding it harder and harder to support either belligerent in this. Note that the people on either side of the Ishmael/Isaac split are not the evil actors here. They are the pawns, merely.
So who are the Kings?
Hamas exists because Netanyahu wants it to; he has had the chance to stamp it out for years, since he’s been in power. But he’s fed them because the alternative, the Palestinian Authority, were too centrist. Netanyahu is an accelerationist of the worst kind, in that he has sacrificed Jewish lives to allow Hamas to continue since they won him the 1996 election (96% of Israelis polled lately believe that the incursion was his fault for lack of readiness, and he’s lost the support of a majority of the people). Bust this- the hardline Israeli that grabbed the hood ornament off of Rabin’s car just before he was assassinated is now the Minister of Security for Netanyahu.
He’s a politician of the highest order, keeping his friends dead and his enemies closer.
In the midst of this, again I reiterate, live two similar event-oriented Abrahamic traditions that existed through 1400 years of war without either side giving an inch. Then something terrible happened to one of them, and they were chosen as the victor in the Levant by colonizers who didn’t own the land so much as occupied it.
They backed off and let Israel fend for itself, and this is the Israel we know (and love), today. They’ve got to fight or be wiped off the Earth. And the people, the pawns on both sides of the wall, are the ones that need our support. That need our aid.
The Gaza Health Authority says that 7000 humans are missing. And there’s a lot of kids in that line of body bags. Those kids aren’t soldiers. They aren’t Hamas.
We have to do better than just believing that the outrage that Netanyahu expresses and foments, preaching it, and winding up further condemning “Palestinians who throw gays off buildings”. We have to realize that Palestinian parents (maybe they’re soldiers?) are labelling their children’s bodies so that their names aren’t lost.
When the smoke clears from this, as usual, it won’t be the Kings that lay before us. Just an endless list of pawns. A couple days ago Israel bombed a UN school.
Biden said that it’s a war; you’re gonna have to break some eggs in the midst of this omelet. And I’ve said it before. Its very easy to see the horror on October 7th, but its never easy to pick a side in Israel. Like in Syria. Like in Iraq. Seeing things in black/white from the cheap seats in the West is a privilege, and we’re being led to believe by more Kings here.
Our pawnish outrage is also bought and paid for, sure. And it matters less than the body bags that keep on piling up.
So who started it? The Arabs did, in 1948. BTW, there has never been a Palestinian state. Could you please cite the various dates over the last 1400 years when the “two Abrahamic traditions have existed through 1400 years of war”, because although I aware of plenty of times when Islamic states have been at war with other nations, I am not aware of anytime over the last 1400 years when Jews have been at war with anybody, although millions of them have certainly been murdered by various groups (some claiming a religious background, some secular). There is no rationalization for what occurred on Oct 7th anymore than one can rationalize the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe during WW 2. This is an existential struggle for the survival of the Jews (and anyone else, but especially the Jews) who live in Israel. Hamas and its supporters want to kill every last Jew in Israel and permanently destroy their nation. This is their version of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”. To say we need to sit back and look at this from 30,000 feet is to avoid recognizing the reality of the situation.
Isn’t part of the problem the decline in teaching of critical thinking? My experience was the opposite. As a Gen X’r, I was not only encouraged to question others’ reasoning no matter their stature, but to also consider issues from multiple sides. As a STEM student, I took a PoliSci elective at U of A on Contemporary Moral Issues. The class covered different viewpoints on issues such as capital punishment, abortion, official bilingualism, equalization, LGBT rights etc. with no mention of certain views being correct or incorrect. Examinations focused on picking an issue, such as Pro-Life, out of hat and writing an essay to argue the position. In a subsequent exam, the essays would be randomly distributed to the other students in the class to write rebuttals.
I wonder how long this Prof would last today?