GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Thursday, June 23, 2005

This concerns me...

The next generation seems hostile to Israel.
A new survey of attitudes toward Israel among graduate students at top US universities offers a disturbing, if not frightening, picture of increasing sympathy for the Palestinian cause and blame on the Jewish state for the lack of peace.

The report being issued this week by The Israel Project, a Washington-based group seeking to strengthen Israel's image, finds that "tomorrow's leaders... are hostile to the Jewish state," a growing trend that could jeopardize American foreign policy toward Israel in the near future.

Titled "How The Next Generation Views Israel," the report was written by Frank Luntz, a pollster who has conducted a number of surveys on the attitudes of young people toward Israel and Jewish life for The Israel Project and other groups.

It was based on "face-to-face group interviews" Luntz conducted with nearly 150 students under age 30 in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. They attended law, business, journalism or government programs at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Georgetown, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Northwestern and UCLA.

Many of the students come from homes sympathetic to Israel, Luntz reported, but through exposure to university professors and mainstream media have grown "impatient" with Israel and emotionally connected to the Palestinian cause, to the point of rationalizing Palestinian suicide bombings and coming to see Israel as a "burden" to the United States rather than "an ally."

What's more, Luntz found a thin line between anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment among "these young elites," noting that "they may not be in the 'Zionism is racism' camp, but they're not all that far away."

He said the students "view any US support of Israel as generated by wealthy Jewish special interests rather than as a reflection of the national interest."
There's a lot more to this article, so please read it all. I assume that there are similarly hostile attitudes in Canada.