Maybe they can wipe it away, like, with a cloth. And they definitely should.
Not that we should ridicule Hillary Clinton for this message, which is as gutsy as it is likely to prove futile. She’s a sharp enough politician, once her entitlement stops coming into play, to know the direction her party has taken on Islamist terrorism. She knows where the political incentives lie.
And yet, Hillary refuses to play along, to her credit (via Instapundit):
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a stark warning this week, arguing that young Americans are increasingly turning against Israel because they are consuming misleading and often fabricated social media content about the Gaza war.
Speaking at an Israel Hayom summit in New York, Clinton said that young people were being influenced by “totally made up” videos depicting alleged Israeli actions in Gaza, many of which she claimed were nothing more than stylized pro-Hamas propaganda.
Clinton noted that more than half of young Americans now receive their news primarily from platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where short, highly sensationalized clips often spread faster than verified information. She warned that these platforms prioritize emotion over context, leaving users vulnerable to narratives that ignore decades of Israeli security dilemmas, Hamas terrorism, and the broader regional picture.
Clinton lamented that her attempts to have conversations with young people over the Gaza War have been fruitless, noting that students “did not know history, they had very little context, and what they were being told on social media was not just one-sided, it was pure propaganda.”
First off, Hillary’s position in support of Israel should not surprise anyone. She and Bill Clinton have criticized Israel and pushed the two-state solution throughout their foreign-policy careers, but they have not made the mistake of tipping over into outright “river to the sea” idiocy. They have supported Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, even if their preferred approaches papered over those conflicts rather than dealt with them directly and finally. There are plenty of Hillary’s actions and policies as Secretary of State to criticize, but she was and has been as firmly in support of Israel as the previous version of the Democrat Party would embrace.
One could have assumed that Hillary merely went along with that older framework, but if so, it would be easy for Hillary to bend in this wind now. She’s standing up for liberal democracy in its fight against Islamist terrorism and totalitarianism when it counts, not just when it was easy. Even if she didn’t want to go the Full Palestinia, Hillary could just have kept her mouth shut and vented Trump Derangement Syndrome 24/7. There’s a yuuuuge market for that these days.
Instead, Hillary is acting like a Cassandra at Troy or Jeremiah before the Babylonians arrive. She has to know that her intended audience will reject her warnings, and nevertheless, she persists. (If you know, you know.) And Hillary is absolutely correct in her analyses, as well as her prophecies:
”It’s not just the usual suspects. It’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand. A lot of the challenge is with younger people. More than 50 percent of young people in America get their news from social media,” Clinton said.
“So, just pause on that for a second. They are seeing short-form videos, some of them totally made up, some of them not at all representing what they claim to be showing, and that’s where they get their information,” continued Clinton, who previously served as a US senator from New York.
That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s not the entire problem. Hamas propaganda doesn’t just come through TikTok and Instagram; it comes from the Protection Racket Media, too. American media outlets have run outright propaganda as news almost since the October 7 war started two years ago. Remember when every major US outlet accused Israel of destroying the Al-Ahli hospital based on Hamas’ accusation, when sunlight showed the hospital still standing and operating? It took the NY Times a week to finally add an “editor’s note” to admit only that Hamas had “failed to make [the] case.”
And Hillary also misses the fact that these young people are not just responding to “short-form videos,” but years of indoctrination into anti-Semitic tropes and pro-Hamas propaganda in Academia, and even in primary and secondary education. That indoctrination has made two generations susceptible to Hamas and Iranian propaganda that the Jews are the settlers in their ancestral land, where they have lived and worshiped the same God for 3,500 years, rather than the Arab colonizers who showed up in the Levant in the 7th and 8th centuries, whence the ‘Palestinians’ descended.
Kudos to Hillary Clinton for speaking the truth in the face of both irrationality and futility. She will bear some cost from that, even if it’s just a slide into Cassandrian irrelevance among her own political factions. The rest of us had better wake up to the true scope of this problem, however. The core of it isn’t social media, but the corruption of American education by radicals and foreign money that has tranformed it into an indoctrination industry that churns out moral idiots and benighted fools by the bucketload.
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