Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about stupidity.
Its nexus with hatred, that is.
The connection was amusingly evident last month, when when a 34-year-old woman named Ruba Almaghtheh, shouting “Free Palestine,” plowed her Chevy Impala into a building in Indianapolis associated with the “Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge,” a black supremacist sect whose ideology is based on animosity toward white people and, in particular, Jews.
Ms. Almaghtheh, a Muslim native of Jordan, told officers at the scene that she had been watching coverage of the war in Gaza before driving into the “Israel school” and, according to the arrest affidavit, she “decided to [crash] into the building on purpose because she observed a symbol [a star resembling a Jewish one]… on the residence…”
Nice going, Ruba!
Another contender of the Dumbest Hater prize, heretofore the “Ruba,” is Benjamin Burton Brower Jr., 30, who faces felony charges of his own after surveillance cameras at the Salvation Army church and soup kitchen in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recorded him in broad daylight taping razor blades to the hand railing at the building’s entrance.
He was fingered because, according to the Altoona Police Department, he was “shirtless during the incident and identified by a large red swastika tattoo on his chest.”
Not the brightest wolf in the lair.
Then, of course, we have the utter ignorance displayed by college students whose minds somehow permanently deleted the events of October 7 and absorbed a mindless “pro-Hamas” mush in the guise of supporting Palestinian aspirations.
Chant along with me: “From the classrooms to the quad, minds have turned to sod.”
Comedian/commentator Bill Maher well expressed the student mind-muddle at some Ivy League universities with a memorable metaphor: “If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market.”
He went on to note “how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed—in the case of Israel, oppressors being babies and bubbes.”
None of which, of course, is to say that all anti-Semites or all anti-Israel “activists” are stupid. There are plenty of high-IQ haters. But, when one notes their justifications for their prejudiced positions—wild notions and conspiracy theories, especially about Jews—and their ready acceptance of demonstrable lies as facts (and, concomitantly, their total ignoring of actual facts), the inescapable conclusion is that, stupid or not, what they spew is stupidity.
And what they often reveal is simple ignorance.
A recent survey of college students who sympathize with Palestinians showed that less than half of the students who embrace the “from the river to the sea…” slogan, which Hamas used in its 2017 “revised” charter, were able to name the river and the sea they were shouting about. (Some 10% of those surveyed, moreover, identified Yasser Arafat as the first prime minister of Israel.)
And then there is the ignorance of the definitions of the words “genocide,” “apartheid” and “terrorism.”
Genocide, as defined in 1948 by the United Nations Genocide Convention, refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Considering that, from 1990 to 2022, the Palestinian population increased from 1.98 million to 5.04 million people, Israel is sure doing an uncharacteristically bad job of genocide.
There’s only one genocidal actor in the current war, and it isn’t Israel.
Apartheid was South Africa’s racist system of institutionalized segregation from 1948 to the early 1990s. The government forbade blacks from marrying non-blacks. Hospitals and beaches were segregated. Education opportunities for blacks were restricted.
Israeli law mandates, and its independent courts ensure, the equal treatment of all the country’s citizens, Arab and Jew alike. Israeli Arab citizens serve as ambassadors, legislators, journalists and academics. Not to mention that the Knesset includes an Islamist Arab political party, or that Arab citizens of Israel have been elected to every Knesset since the state’s founding.
And terrorism refers to violent actions intended to, well, instill terror, rather than to achieve a military objective. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was terrorism. The al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, were terrorism. The October 7 Hamas pogrom was terrorism. Israel’s current war is an attempt to prevent terrorism.
So much stupidity and ignorance. It will be hard to decide who wins the Ruba.
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