An email from an Australian educator, lamenting that children in her country are the target of an indoctrination campaign via the social media spread of outright lies or complete twisting of the truth, got me thinking about the common denominator between these Western youth and the children of Gaza. The latter have long been the prey of deadly long-term indoctrination campaigns, with the aim of utilizing them as tools of war.
Unlike the 1960s and 70s, when standing out from the crowd or displaying a rebellious spirit was considered “cool” and “non-conformist,” Gen Z (those born between 1997-2012) is mostly a cohesive robotic bloc, unwilling to strike out toward independent thinking, finding more comfort and safety in adopting whatever trends or opinions are corporately held by their generation.
It is, therefore, no wonder that social media platforms, such as Tik-Tok, Instagram, and Facebook, invest so much effort in this massive and pliable market.
Political grooming has replaced the consumer market, with young people the perfect audience to motivate and accomplish their goals once they have been sufficiently indoctrinated. Given Gen Z’s propensity to walk, think, and act in lockstep, they can be a formidable army since their numbers reach 2 billion globally.
In the case of Gaza youth, we already know that their parents have been complicit in allowing them to be propagandized and brainwashed to believe the extreme doctrines and ideologies contained in the writings of radical Islam calling for jihad with the aim of “destroying Israel with the aim of creating an Islamic state that would include the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel” (“Israel at war with Hamas,” The Wall Street Journal, October 11).
Western youth, who don’t live in Gaza, might hear someone on TikTok falsely report that the present Israel-Hamas war began when Israel invaded Gaza in order to commit genocide. Semafor Net Zero, a left-leaning news website, claims that “some of Tik-Tok’s content is distorted... sometimes [publishing] misleading or exaggerated claims about the war, some of which downplay Hamas’ attack on Israel.” (“Why TikTok feels overwhelmingly pro-Palestine right now,” Semafor Net Zero, October 29).
Indoctrination of Gen Z and Gazan youth
Taking into consideration their massive ignorance of the 2,000-year history of Jewish persecution, accompanied by forced conversion, exile, blood libels, massacres, and pogroms, culminating in Hitler’s 20th-century attempt to rid the world of Jews in the Holocaust, it’s not difficult to win over young people who’ve only been exposed to a one-sided concept that the nation of Israel was Palestinian land, stolen by Jews who disenfranchised “indigenous” Arabs from their homeland.
These missing facts assist them in seamlessly weaving their “woke” ideology into their worldview, believing that the Jewish people are a strong nation of oppressors whose overbearing military power and advantage of “white privilege” has enabled them to persecute and enslave those who were supposedly dispossessed from their native land.
It is that very distorted characterization that then becomes responsible for “triggering” their heightened sense of injustice, shaped by the lens of everything falling into the category of victim or oppressor, the latter qualifying as the evildoers who must be finished off.
While it’s another iteration of the type of indoctrination deeply instilled into the minds of children born into Gazan society, it still accomplishes the same belief system. Gazan children, unlike their Western counterparts, have been exploited and manipulated into believing that their terrorist government leaders are the very ones who will extricate them from their oppressive existence. But to capture each sector of today’s youth, the Jewish people must be painted as the central problem which, once eliminated, will result in the return of Islamic land to its rightful owners, correcting a 76-year injustice.
Similarly, in both groups, the need to obfuscate and conceal factual history and archaeological evidence and fail to provide a full context of the Jewish and Arab people, serves to stir up ample rage and loathing as the motivation for disseminating hatred and condemnation toward Israel and, by association, all Jewish people, For Gazan youth, such hatred helps proliferate their recruitment as useful soldiers in an army established to end all Jewish presence in the Middle East.
WITHOUT THE vocal juggernaut of condemnation and protest provided by Western youth coupled with the violent terror machine of Gazan youth our world might actually look completely different.
In effect, dishonest and agenda-driven social media combined with radical Islamic operatives are hijacking this generation for the despicable purposes of rewriting history in order to forcibly seize land and, in the end, destroy an entire ethnicity of people.
Sadly, parents either don’t understand this or are so preoccupied with other things that they’ve allowed their children to be influenced and programmed by evil purveyors of terror who have seen the value of this younger demographic as real assets to achieve their goals.
That is why parents, grandparents, educators, clergy – and anyone who truly cares about the well-being and proper development and education of youth – need to understand the vicious war being waged to captivate their minds and actions.
It’s time to fight back and introduce them to the real values that have escaped them: truth and respect for the value of others. If they don’t acquire these values, Gen Z will go on to destroy future generations, yet to be born.
The writer is a former Jerusalem elementary and middle school principal. She is also the author of Mistake-Proof Parenting, available on Amazon, based on the time-tested wisdom found in the Book of Proverbs.