NO FACTS PLEASE! WE’RE PALESTINE ACTIVISTS!

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE STOOPID TO ATTEND A “PRO-PALESTINIAN” RALLY, BUT IT SURE SEEMS TO BE A CORE DEMOGRAPHIC.

Why, oh why, isn’t anyone talking about Palestine!!??

I’m thinking about starting a sub-Substack focused exclusively on the ignorance around Israel and Palestine. Because just when you think the anti-Israel mob could literally not get any stoopider, along comes this Einstein.

Apparently strutting by a Greek restaurant in New Jersey, Amber Matthews, a self-righteous moron known on social media as Ambamelia, sees a strings of plastic Greek flags outside a Greek restaurant and decides they are Israeli flags. So she videos herself tearing them down while yelling “Free Palestine!”

“What are you looking at?” she hollers at the disbelieving restaurant worker. “You know damn well there’s a genocide. I’m taking this shit down. I don’t stand for it. There’s genocide, and I don’t stand for Zionism. Are you proud of your heritage?”

When the staffer tells the prodigy they are Greek flags, not Israeli, the wunderkind simply says, “My bad. It looks like Israel. Do you want it back?”

In the past year, there have been so many examples like this (thanks ubiquitous video cameras!) like this one where a dude with a camera exposes the ignorance of people attending a rally in the UK.

When questioned, one intellect who stopped to talk to a camera says, “I’m definitely not the person to talk to about this.”

Some of the clueless are driven by darkweb conspiracies like this marching muttonhead.

In other cases, they don’t even have conspiracy theories to guide them — they just have no idea what they’re talking about at all.

Here is an interesting contrast between the two sides. A guy shoves a mic in the faces of pro-Israel and “pro-Palestine” activists. You decide who you’d rather have speaking for your side.

This video includes one of my faves, the conspiracy theory that the world is silent on Palestinian suffering. Terrible things have been happening to the Palestinian people for 75 years, says one person standing amid hundreds of agitated anti-Israel activists, “And I didn’t hear anyone say anything.”

Yes, of course. No one is talking about Palestine. Every other cause on the planet is eclipsed — every human made and natural catastrophe is pushed off the front pages and out of the UN General Assembly because it’s Palestine! Palestine! Palestine! 24/7 — but, sure, you don’t hear anyone talking about it. Maybe if you stopped chanting slogans long enough to listen …

I’m not saying there aren’t dummies on our side. I was in a discussion on campus with anti-Israel activists one time and a young woman I didn’t know tried to help my case by telling my interlocutors that Israel is surrounded by enemies “who want to push them into the Dead Sea.”

I didn’t say it, but I thought, “Really? What’s the worst that would happen?”

The issue is that, in the anti-Israel (or “pro-Palestine”) movement, ignorance is not an incidental phenomenon. Every cause, movement and family has its ignoramuses. In the anti-Israel hate movement, they are the lifeblood.

Ignorance is central to the strategy.

Facts are not on their side. Palestinians have been given opportunity after opportunity for self-determination and they refuse to take yes for an answer. Because gaining self-determination for themselves is not the main object of their movement. Taking away the self-determination of their Jewish neighbors is.

So the movement uses emotions over reason. They employ images and memes over intellectual engagement. They boycott anything where they might learn something about the other side. They engage in academic boycotts, the 21st-century version of book-burning, for fear of learning challenging ideas. (Plus, it has the added benefit of kicking the Jews where it hurts — right in the books!) They scream over speakers. And they tear down streamers of Greek flags, then sheepishly say “My bad,” before going on to stoopid again.

In an interesting experiment, Ron E. Hassner, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, surveyed 230 undergrads to measure their concern for, and knowledge about, various topics in the Middle East. Almost half declared that they “cared deeply” about the occupation of Palestinian territories — the highest option of interest the professor presented. But 75% of these students couldn’t find the Palestinian territories on a map. One in four of them placed Palestine in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

“Students who felt most strongly about the Palestinian issue knew less about it than their more moderate peers,” Hassner wrote. “In contrast, students with slightly more moderate levels of interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tend to know more, are more likely to admit gaps in their knowledge and, as a result, are less likely to hold erroneous beliefs.”

He adds: “This fascination with the Palestinian issue does not seem to be motivated by a broader humanitarian concern for national liberation struggles. My students cared far less about other Middle East occupations, such as the Kurdish struggle for independence, the occupation of Western Sahara, or the occupation of Northern Cyprus. Curiously, even the 100 students who ‘care deeply’ about the Palestinian occupation shared that indifference towards other disputes.”

Hassner’s survey was in 2019, so while I hesitate to use this somewhat dated example, my thinking is, You think activists got smarter since then?

One young activist friend who had made Palestine a top priority illustrated the power of ignorance when I suggested that, at root, Israel is not hated for the occupation or “policies” but was unwelcome from the moment of its birth because it is a Jewish state. My friend asserted that Israel had a chance to develop good neighborly relations but failed. Having assumed I was dealing with an informed individual, given all his righteous indignation and passionate intensity, I discovered that he was not aware of even the most seminal fact of the conflict: that it began with the mass invasion by all neighboring Arab states at the moment Israel became independent in 1948.

A then-Vancouver city councilor who had signed his name to a prominent public statement condemning Israel told me of his junket to Tel Aviv — then sheepishly clarified with me that Tel Aviv was, in fact, in Israel.

One Israeli-Canadian filmmaker I met asks activists where they think the borders should be drawn between Israel and, say, Portugal, to gauge whether the person he’s engaging with can even find the place on a map.

A friend of mine was chatting during a smoke break outside the office and was asked where her accent was from. When she said “Israel,” the other person piously declared that it was terrible what that country was doing to the Jews.

All we can do is keep screaming the truth into the abyss. But it does seem dispiriting to witness the profound ignorance at the heart of the anti-Israel movement.

If it weren’t for the obvious embarrassment many of these people demonstrate on camera when they are caught in their own idiocy, one might almost think the witlessness was a point of pride. They have doggedly refused to learn anything about the issue they have made the core of their activism.

Does it have anything to do with their perceptions around the nature of their enemy?

It’s almost as though they are making a direct contrast between themselves and the people on the other side.

Those Jews are so clever, I imagine them thinking. We’ll show them!