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As violent pro-Palestine protests continue to erupt at universities all across America, it is legitimate to ask just how much some of the overgrown infants involved might actually know about the whole conflict itself in the first place.

One Junior Trot throwing a tantrum at New York University (NYU) in late April was caught on camera unashamedly admitting she didn’t actually know why she was there protesting about anything at all; with her ostentatious septum ring, she evidently proved quite easy for others to lead by the nose. Turning around to ask her face-mask-wearing friend if she knew why they were there, the second girl admitted she had absolutely no idea either.

INTERVIEWER: Why are you protesting?

NOSE-RING GIRL: I don’t know. I’m pretty sure there’s something about Israel. Why are we protesting?

FACE-MASK GIRL: I wish I was more educated.

NOSE-RING GIRL: I’m not either.

With levels of self-righteous empty-headedness this colossal, I am reminded of the Ali G actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s notorious old question to a retired Mossad chief, “Why are you so anti-hummus? Isn’t pita bread the real enemy [of the Jews]?”

Bordering on the Ridiculous
Last December, Ron E. Hassner, a political-science professor at Berkeley, decided to quiz U.S. students about the new chant du jour “Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea.”

He found that, whilst a combined 86 percent of kids questioned supported this idea, only 47 percent were correctly able to name the river and sea in question (the Jordan and the Mediterranean, for any hopeless nose-ring people who may happen to be reading this article whilst mouthing all the big words out silently with their lips).

To judge by their laughably incorrect answers, many of the students questioned in fact thought Palestine’s distinctly expansionist post-Zionism-era borders should not only stretch right the way across the present-day State of Israel, but even as far out as the Rivers Nile and Euphrates, whilst the seas its future coastline should border included the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean.

Willy Wonka and the Rocket Factory
If the future shores of Palestine should indeed end up adjoining the Caribbean, then the region will naturally need to recruit its own heroic anti-Zionist pirates. Step forward the heroic, Hamas-allied Houthis, who each day do us proud by turning another ship around with their deadly, Iran-supplied missiles.

One particularly important local pirate leader is 19-year-old online influencer Rashid Al Haddad, an ostensible AK-47-wielding militant who helped document life aboard the rebel-captured vessel Galaxy Leader, from which he broadcast youth-friendly TikTok videos about the Houthi buccaneers’ highly exciting life on the ocean wave.

For his troubles, Rashid became known as “Jihadi Depp,” after the star of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise, Johnny Depp. However, as Rashid was suspiciously well-dressed and photogenic, he also gained the rival nicknames of “The Houthi Hottie” and “TimHouthi Chalamet,” after Hollywood actor Timothée Chalamet, star of the latest Willy Wonka film, whom the self-styled “media personality and photographer” supposedly resembled. Disturbingly, the jizzy jihadi’s good looks appeared to make Western TikTok users more susceptible to holding sympathy toward his basic, ill-typed message of “Free Palestine we will bomb all Israeli ship.”

“He can hijack me,” one easily impressed female social media addict wrote; “Does his boat have room for one more…?” queried another, desperate to be Jolly Rogered. What a pathetic indictment of how easily swayed some people are in their opinions nowadays. In online wars of the future, the side purportedly supported by the likes of Keira Knightley and George Clooney will easily win out over that unfortunate enough to be backed only by Lizzo and Harry Redknapp.

Gayness in Gaza
Perhaps we should not be too surprised that certain young people today are cretinous enough to view terrorists primarily as potential sex objects. After all, this is simply the prism through which certain of their own humanities professors now seem to urge them to view such lovely people.

This is a genuine abstract of a U.K. academic paper, “The Soldier and the Terrorist: Sexy Nationalism, Queer Violence,” produced by the University of Manchester’s possibly very aptly named Adi Kuntsman:

An Israeli soldier, praised for killing terrorists in their homes, and adored as a gay Prince Charming; a Palestinian gay man called either a lying terrorist or a cute Arab boy with an almond ass; an Abu-Ghraib prisoner, whose naked body, pornographically mediated and distributed by the media, generates a homosexual rape fantasy of all Arabs in-the-name-of-Israeli security…. [The author has collected such online gay terror-porn in order to illustrate his Queer Theory thesis that] homosexual [wank] fantasies work to create attachment to one’s national home and hatred towards those defined as its enemies.

Today’s unthinkingly anti-colonialist students might not be able to find Israel on the map they want to wipe it off, but never mind. Being able to accurately assign bizarre layers of abstract imagined homosexuality to members of Mossad and Hamas in the name of radical queer decolonization is what counts as being true geopolitical knowledge in Western academia these days!

Visions of Johannah
Force-fed an endless diet of meaningless masturbatory Marxist pseudo-knowledge like this, today’s students are easy meat indeed for any passing ideologues. Imagine how difficult it must be to hold your own in any potential argument against true Middle East obsessives if your only prior knowledge of the region is that some of its best terrorists might have really big dicks.

How else can we account for the existence of the fabulously brain-dead Johannah King-Slutsky, the (apparently Jewish) student protester at Columbia University who, to much derision, recently demanded campus authorities airlift in the protesters some food as “humanitarian aid,” or else. “Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation?” she asked watching cameras. Yes, please, that would be an absolutely ideal outcome at this point.

Silly Slutsky’s own current PhD Nonsense Studies dissertation is on “fantasies of limitless energy in the Romantic transatlantic imagination from 1760 to 1869”—presumably, rereading Coleridge and Keats and pretending it’s really somehow all about global warming. The Houthis themselves have just stepped in and offered a free place to any U.S. students expelled due to their protests at their very own prestigious Sanaa University in Yemen, where the curriculum is probably rather more rigorous than that on offer at Columbia these days; if Ms. Slutsky wants to experience what it feels like to genuinely starve on campus, she should sail out there immediately on an exchange program with Rashid Al Haddad.

Maybe Sanaa University could offer future American exchange students a comprehensive course in geography? In a previous 2019 survey of 230 Berkeley undergraduates, Professor Ron E. Hassner found that, of the 43 percent who claimed to “care deeply” about the Israel-Palestine situation, 75 percent could not find the Occupied Territories on a map. Indeed, the more brazenly and showily they “cared” about the issue, the less they actually knew about it:

More tellingly, the students with the strongest feelings about the Palestinian issue were also the most overconfident. They were the least likely to leave their answers blank and the most likely to offer a wild guess. 25% of these students placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. The class average for this blunder was 14%. This pattern of brash ignorance recurred across all questions related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

How to explain this curious pattern? Professor Hassner guessed as follows: “It’s tempting to speculate that current political trends on campuses require students to profess strong opinions about divisive issues, regardless of their level of knowledge or understanding, as a way of signaling their identity and values.” If such peer pressure was present back in 2019, then it would appear to be even more so today, post–October 7.

Israel Is Real? Yes, That’s Why They Called It That
Interestingly, according to Professor Hassner’s latest December 2023 study, when shown some actual, non-gay facts about the current deep-seated conflict in the Middle East, previously cocksure students began to rapidly change their minds:

Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel…75%…changed their view [that extending Palestine “from the river to the sea” would actually work]…. 60%…reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis…. In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students…[began] rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography.

Let us be fair. Children—especially big ones like today’s university students—are pretty easy to feed full of misinformation. What, really, would you expect the average 18-year-old Advanced Lesbian Studies undergraduate to truly know about, say, the current situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, or the plight of the Druze in whatever country it is in which the Druze are currently suffering their plight?

It is certainly possible to construct a plausible, coherent argument against Israel’s current and past conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. But are most of the student-radical protesters we are seeing at the moment actually capable of doing so themselves personally? Not really, no. So instead they just chuck on a kaffiyeh or a tea towel and go around cosplaying as Saladin Jr. or something.

According to Professor Hassner, 10 percent of students quizzed in December 2023 were so clueless they thought Yasser Arafat was the first prime minister of Israel. That’s nothing. When I was about 10, my granddad told me the Palestinian chieftain in question was called Yasser Marrowfat, and I believed him (for U.S. readers: “Marrowfat” are a type of British peas). My grandfather also told me northern Iraq was full of a hitherto-unknown race called the “Turds,” not the Kurds, and that followers of one of the two main branches of Islam were called the “Shites,” not the Shi’ites, making it no wonder the whole region was rapidly going down the toilet.

The next time some young ignoramus tells you they’re off out on an anti-Israel demo, push them my grandfather’s old “Yasser Marrowfat” line too, and hand them across a homemade placard to carry reading “PEAS IN THE MIDDLE EAST.” Given the sad state of affairs detailed above, I reckon there’s a fair bet they might be dim enough to actually accept it.