How Universities Created Zohran Mamdani

"Our universities now produce educated barbarians who are uneducated on the atrocities of antisemitism."

 The American Spectator   

"The results speak for themselves. When nearly half of young Americans cannot name Auschwitz, when basic historical facts disappear into academic fashions, we create a generation vulnerable to the very ideologies that once nearly destroyed civilization." . . .

Bowdoin College entrance sign surrounded by trees. (Billy Hathorn/CCA-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons)

"There is a particular species of ignorance that flourishes in the academy: one that mistakes moral posturing for moral reasoning, slogans for scholarship, and fashionable outrage for historical understanding. Zohran Mamdani, now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, represents the perfected specimen of this breed: the educated barbarian.

"Consider the extraordinary trajectory that led us here. A man who praised Hamas financiers in rap songs, who declared Israel guilty of genocide within days of October 7, who promises to arrest foreign leaders based on his interpretation of international law — this man now stands poised to govern America’s largest city. He is not some fringe radical clawing his way up from the margins. He is the product of Bowdoin College, one of our finest liberal arts institutions, where his worldview was carefully cultivated and his activism legitimized. 

"The pathology began early. At Bowdoin, Mamdani co-founded the college’s first Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which invited As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor who would later declare that America “made its bed” with the September 11 attacks and had “inflicted many 9/11s on people around the world.” This was not youthful indiscretion but institutional validation: a prestigious liberal arts college providing a platform for someone who celebrated George Habash, dubbed “the godfather of Middle East terrorism.”

"Mamdani’s education exemplifies a broader institutional failure. Recent surveys reveal the staggering scope of historical ignorance among young Americans. Nearly half of millennials cannot name a single concentration camp from the more than 40,000 that existed during the Holocaust. In New York — Mamdani’s own state — an astounding 58 percent cannot identify even one. When 63 percent of young Americans don’t know that six million Jews were murdered, and 36 percent believe the number was two million or fewer, we confront an educational catastrophe. 

"Most disturbing of all: 19 percent of New York’s millennials believe Jews caused the Holocaust — the highest rate in the nation. Such ignorance doesn’t emerge spontaneously. It requires systematic cultivation by institutions that have abandoned their responsibility to transmit historical truth." . . .

. . ."The remedy is both simple and radical: mandatory Holocaust education in every university — not merely as a graduate program but as a required undergraduate course. Students should study the Wannsee Conference minutes, read Eichmann’s testimony, examine the railway schedules that carried millions to their deaths. They should understand that when Nazi officials spoke of the “final solution,” they meant exactly what they said." . . .Read more...

Paul Packer: When American Power Meets Jewish Survival;