The Wall Street Journal published an essay written by a political scientist who did something almost unique: he collected some data and discovered something interesting, if not surprising.

From Which River to Which Sea?
Is ignorance bliss? https://t.co/WdCBmhXZZn

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali (@Ayaan) December 10, 2023

It turns out that the students passionately advocating for a “free” Palestine have no idea about the cause to which they claim to be attached.

They haven’t a clue.

That shouldn’t surprise us since a substantial number of younger people believe the Holocaust is a hoax. They are so poorly educated and so indoctrinated that basic facts elude them, and they are incurious about what they are.

One in five young Americans think the Holocaust is a myth, according to our new polling https://t.co/bO1p43uUAF ⬇️

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 11, 2023

Another, even larger chunk, believe that the Holocaust is being exaggerated. This group believes that using the wrong pronoun is “genocide” simultaneously believes that working hard to rid the world of Jews and managing to eliminate the majority of them in Europe isn’t that big a deal.

Political Scientist Ron Hassner hired a survey firm to ask students what they think the phrase “From the River to the Sea” actually means, and the answers reveal a lot.

When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.

Students are extremely passionate on this issue, as you have seen with your own eyes. Some are committing what amounts to assault, while many of the rest are chanting slogans and putting enormous pressure on people for a cause about which they know almost nothing.

We already knew that students’ ideas were muddled on the issue of Israel’s right to exist. We hear the term “settler colonialist” to describe Jews, an ethnic group that has inhabited Israel for thousands of years. The al Aqsa Mosque, after which the Hamas terrorist attack is named, is actually built over the Jewish temple that lies at the heart of Judaic worship in Jerusalem.

In other words, the “Palestinians” are the settler colonialists, and these students have no idea that this is the case.

In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.

Two things are brought into high relief from these findings: first, despite the vast sums of money spent in the West on “education” our young people are remarkably ignorant of basic facts; second, our education system and culture prize and encourage activism above almost anything else, and the activism is promoted in an environment of near total ignorance.

Neither of these is accidental or due to chance. The people who run our education system prize the ignorance of the students because they can promote activism for causes the people in charge want to influence. The students’ ignorance is important–it gives all the power to direct the activist impulse in the direction desired by the Left.

When students are informed about basic facts they become less inclined to help the Left, so information is the enemy to the people in charge of “education.”

Our education system has become an agent for leftist activists and is utterly unconcerned about empowering students to think critically. This is why we see the celebration of ignoramuses like Greta Thunberg. She is the perfect model. A pubescent teen promoted as an avatar of science, whom the leaders of the world pretended to listen to and admire.

I would put real money on a bet that few High School teachers could pass basic knowledge tests from a few decades ago, because it is not their job to know things or pass knowledge on to the next generation. They are the Red Guards of the transnational elite. And like the Red Guards, it will eventually bring down even the people at the top.

Not that the demise of the tyrants at the top will help any of the victims, and it is not at all sure that the collapse of this regime will lead to something better.

But there is little doubt that the revolution will eat its own. It the meantime enormous damage is being done.