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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.
As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay detail in "Cynical Theories: How activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity," postcolonial theory and related ideologies now have great influence in universities. Critical theory promotes intergroup violence to disrupt "systems of oppression" — a term used in Minnesota's proposed K-12 social studies standards — while rejecting objectivity, individual rights, the rule of law and national boundaries. For postcolonial theorists, Jewish children in Israel are not individuals with decades of family history in the region and historic roots dating back millennia — they are instead oppressive "settler colonialists" who deserve what they get.