(...) judging from the sentiments of Gen Z, because the same generation that
professes
to be the most intolerant of bigotry is also the most intolerant of bigotry's most
consistently hunted targets, the Jews. A December 2023 Economist/YouGov Poll
found that exactly half of all Americans aged 18-29 either think "the Holocaust is a
myth," or are agnostic about whether the worst genocide in modern times is factual
or
mythical. A Harvard-Harris poll that month found that 67 percent of 18-24-year-olds
"think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors."
If the Oct. 7 massacre was a case of Jews "being treated as oppressors," it would
explain why it was celebrated on so many campuses and why support for Hamas
(not Palestinians) is alarmingly widespread among Gen Z. An Oct 18-19
Harvard-Harris poll, albeit one with a small sample of respondents, found that
48 percent of Gen Zers supported the jihadist death cult that endorsed the 9/11
attacks and eulogized Osama bin Laden.
Even correcting for the possibility that these numbers overstate the case, it
remains that the generation that wears the label "anti-racist" most proudly is
the most susceptible to the bigotry that the word "racism" originally and almost
exclusively designated: antisemitism.
(...)
While some of these Gen Zers must be aware of their antisemitism, most are probably unwitting carriers of this strain of racism. This adds another layer of hypocrisy to their antisemitism because from Gen Z's glass houses, a stone very often thrown is the charge that Americans fail to recognize their "implicit bias," that they're more racist than they realize. This recalls a half-century-old vignette involving another young Western anti-racist similarly deficient in self-awareness. In 1976, four terrorists (two German leftists and two Palestinians) hijacked an Air France plane and diverted it to Entebbe, Uganda, where they released all the passengers except the Israeli citizens and six non-Israeli Jews. Two of the hostages (both Holocaust survivors) pointed out to one of the German hijackers that by herding Jews into captivity he was following the example of the last German generation. "My goals are different," the German protested indignantly.
But antisemites are nothing if not imaginative, and every generation refreshes old justifications, or invents new ones for its hatred. Whether they are illiberal leftists, isolationist rightists, Islamic extremists, white nationalists, or Black separatists, antisemites always think their reasons for hating Jews are "the right reasons." As Albert Einstein observed after Kristallnacht, "The crimes with which the Jews have been charged in the course of history—crimes which were used to justify the atrocities perpetrated against them—have changed in rapid succession."
(...)
https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-infected-antisemitism-spreading-very-disease-its-committed-eradicatingracism-1888052
