The organized incitement and hatred against the Jewish community in the United States and Israel since Oct. 7 is reminiscent of the Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein lyrics from the song “You have to be carefully taught” that I grew up listening to.
The lyrics from the “South Pacific” musical go like this: “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught! You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late. Before you are six, or seven, or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught!”
Why, might you ask, am I talking about song lyrics? Lyrics from a musical aren’t real life. Nothing could be truer when it comes to the terrorist-supporting movement inciting hatred against the Jewish community and Israel. You don’t have to go too far to see a case study of hatred being taught both here and abroad.
On American soil, the once hallowed halls of Ivy League universities have become incubators of hate and violence, filled with professors influenced by foreign actors with funding and professional activist networks orchestrating chaos. Chaos in the form of illegal tent encampments, harassment and attacks on Jewish faculty and students, and even the hostile takeover of university property.
All of those things have happened at Columbia University. Then, we learned something even more nefarious. The Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, according to a lawsuit filed a few weeks ago against the group, had prior knowledge of the massacre that took place in Israel on Oct. 7 and began reactivating its media presence shortly before the attacks began to be prepared for Israel’s inevitable retaliation. These social media accounts were then used to feign cries of war crimes and genocide and mobilize the students in support of Hamas and against Israel.
As the lyrics go, “it must be drummed in your dear little ear,” and drummed into people’s ears, sometimes, both literally and figuratively, has been the chant “From the river to the sea”—a slogan that calls for the erasure and destruction of the nation of Israel. These words are being chanted by students and young people, the majority of whom do not even know what river and sea they are referring to. This movement is not organic but rather the result of a well-funded infrastructure of donors set on destabilizing our nation, eroding support for Israel and planting seeds stirring up the ancient hate of antisemitism.
Organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine are nothing more than fronts for funding and laundering dangerous radical Islamist ideals onto every university and college campus in the United States and abroad. The masterminds behind these grassroots organizations understand the sentiment of the song I referenced earlier.
Hate is not inherent. We aren’t born with it. It is taught and targeted by our surroundings and our communities. Nowhere is that more evident than in Gaza. After Israel gave the Gaza Strip to Palestinian Arabs in an offering and hope of peace, they turned it into a society rife with indoctrination under the democratically elected Hamas. The terror group took power that could have been used to better the lives of the Palestinian community and created an oppressive regime, teaching children from the earliest ages to hate Jews and Israelis.
In the two decades since the last Israelis were moved out of Gaza, it has been well documented that Palestinian children are indoctrinated in schools under the authority of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and at summer camps run by terrorist organizations. The culmination of this radicalization was seen in the willing participation of everyday Palestinians in massacring their Jewish neighbors on Oct. 7. Because, after all, “you’ve got to be taught before it’s too late. Before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
The struggles of the Palestinian people could have been avoided if their leadership had focused on building infrastructure and investing in their future generations and economic growth. Instead, they invested in terrorism. As a result, any lack that the Palestinian people in Gaza felt was due to Hamas, but it was Israel that was continuously blamed. After generations of being taught to hate their Israeli neighbors, when they had the opportunity to rape, torture and murder men, women, and children, the residents of Gaza did—and they did so gleefully.
We now live in a post-Oct. 7 world where Western students are still being filled with lies and propaganda. These students are simply being used by a cause—a cause that hates their liberal progressive values—to sow chaos. The current state of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment is due to a tactical and intentional move by those who seek the destruction of our Judeo-Christian values. That movement is happening through the malicious education and manipulation of the impressionable to further an evil agenda.
If people can be carefully taught to hate, then it’s time we understand the assignment. We must utilize education to teach them the truth—to choose love over hate, to fight against antisemitism and to stand up for the values that have shaped and excelled in Western civilization, and materialized in America and Israel, as a force for good in the world.