Why students back Hamas, and what educators should do about it

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Hamas' attack on Israel killed more Jews in a day than on any day since Hitler's genocide. Hamas deliberately killed children and used rape as a weapon of war. Yet Hamas won enthusiastic support from college students influenced by "postcolonial theory." What is that? How should sensible educators respond?

My dad learned the hard way that bad ideas matter.

Back in the 1930s, Dad read Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" but never took the book seriously. Knowing American politicians like his congressman, the father of Democratic politician Nancy Pelosi, Dad figured anyone smart enough to scheme their way to the top in a country as big as Germany could never believe such rubbish. Surely, the wily Herr Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" to win votes by appealing to Germans' sense of victimhood, like a pandering American politician.

Dad soon learned that Hitler was no Pelosi, nor was Hitler constrained by the U.S. Constitution. A few years after reading "Mein Kampf," my father was among the U.S. soldiers liberating a forced labor camp where the Nazis deliberately starved to death hundreds of people within sight of tons of food, a tiny part of Hitler's master plan to exterminate Jews and other "sub-humans." Only then did my father realize that the visionary Hitler saw individuals as nothing — the plan and the group as everything.

Today, many students misjudge Hamas just as my dad misjudged Hitler. Disturbingly, others support Hamas because they embrace neo-Marxist ideologies denigrating individual rights. Within days of the Oct. 7 attack, more than 30 Harvard University student groups signed a letter calling Israel "solely responsible" for Hamas' atrocities. Similar statements came at other Ivy League universities and even my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, the tips of a vast ideological iceberg.

Likewise, critical theory pioneer Angela Davis spent decades explaining why imprisoned Soviet dissidents "deserve what they get" while working for the KGB, the same outfit that produced Vladimir Putin. Other critical theorists justify Josef Stalin's murder of millions of Ukrainians, horrors explaining why Ukrainians today resist Putin's invasion.

If you think I'm overstating critical theory's influence in education, consider that Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is the third most cited work in the social sciences and among the most widely assigned in college courses. Freire praised Marxist disasters like China's bloody Cultural Revolution and is revered in leading schools of education.

To respond to this, responsible educators must challenge Hamas supporters to openly debate whether Israel, recognized by the United Nations for over 70 years, is a legitimate nation, and whether anything justifies Hamas' intentional brutality and exhortations aimed at "killing the Jews." Even Hitler was more subtle. To be clear, one can work for a Palestinian state while opposing evil — President Bill Clinton did both.

Second, educators should recognize postcolonial theory as part of a broad movement, epitomized by Minnesota's proposed K-12 social studies standards, to erase Marxism's failures. To resist, we should teach about Nov. 9, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which democratized Eastern Europe and (for a time) Russia. From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, U.S. leaders helped contain and eventually defeat Marxist regimes that murdered 90 million people while savaging political, economic, religious, artistic and sexual freedom. Make Fall of the Wall a holiday.

Finally, educators must teach students to reject the relativism portraying imperfect democracies like the U.S., Canada and Israel as no better than Cuba, Russia and Gaza under Hamas. To do so, I and other scholars donated time to build American Birthright: The Civics Alliances Model K-12 Social Studies Standards, modeled after the bipartisan Massachusetts standards used under Gov. Mitt Romney.