As we close out this year and approach the next, we should remember that gratitude is not an incidental or secondary civilizational value. It is the backbone of a free and decent civilization. Those who embrace barbarism love destruction and revolution because they have been trained to detest everything that came before them. But just as the heroic and imperfect Americans who came before us moved history through reflection and choice, we can write the American future by recommitting our educational institutions to gratitude.
Many Americans are bewildered by the anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and pro-Hamas attitudes many young people are espousing. Some points on this trendline are staggering. In the aftermath of Hamas’s barbaric October 7th terrorist attack against Israeli civilians, a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 48 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old Americans sided with Hamas over Israel. A number of student groups penned or signed letters endorsing Hamas’s attack. Young people on campus and city streets across the country have chanted pro-terror slogans, including calls for the complete abolition of Israel and “intifada” to achieve that goal, evoking the two waves of terrorism that claimed thousands of Israeli civilians’ lives.
Anti-Westernism isn’t limited to downplaying or celebrating attacks in Israel. That much is evident in a horrifying trend that recently emerged on TikTok of young Americans announcing their support for Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Hopefully, it is an elaborate prank or shameless attention-seeking. The alternative—that anyone could embrace barbarism with such violent fervor—is almost too bewildering to comprehend.
Commentators have attempted to explain why American college students, the best and brightest of our youth, would so eagerly embrace the most evil causes. Explanations vary, from concluding that it is all an outgrowth of “intersectionality” and “privilege theory”—faddish left-wing ideologies that glorify victimhood and demonize perceived privilege—to speculation that it stems from some related postcolonial mentality that justifies any means of “resistance” by indigenous peoples, no matter how inhumane.
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a fellow at SAPIR: Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future. Howard Slugh is the General Counsel of the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty.
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