Thank you very much.
One question that was asked before was, why is all of this happening? I just want to talk about a few other pieces.
Firstly, Jew hatred is obvious. Anti-Semitism exists in society. We swim in it. It's just systemic; it's always been there. It's 2,000 years old. It's going to take a long time to get rid of it.
That's why we at Hillel talk about pushing anti-Semitism to the margins of campus, not getting rid of it, because it's not reality, and that we have to ground ourselves in the reality that there will always be extremists and always be people with terrible opinions. However, the thing that most concerns me is the rampant misinformation and disinformation spreading among young people, driven basically by young people not engaging with critical thinking.
A great phrase I learned recently refers to “the constellation of beliefs”. If I can pinpoint one star of one of your beliefs, then automatically I can know 20 other beliefs of yours, because you don't think for yourself. You just rely on domino theory dogma: If I believe this, I believe that. I saw a video that came out of an American encampment where a student said, “You should know that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is training Palestinians, and they've always been standing with Palestinians”, the inference being that North Korea are the good guys because they support Palestine and Palestinians are the good guys.
That is what's happening. It's a complete breakdown in critical thinking among our young people. The way I see, really, is that it falls on the people organizing the educational systems: How are you creating this situation where young people don't need to know history? Things of basic history, like really basic things, are shocking to me....