NYT Columnist and Duke Professor Frank Bruni said Friday on PBS’s “Firing Line” that a lot of young progressives never acknowledged how horrific the October 7, 2023 terror attack in Israel was.
Host Margaret Hoover said, “You teach on a college campus.”
Bruni said, “I teach at Duke University.”
Hoover said, “You’re a professor at Duke University. As a college professor, what’s your assessment of how this issue has become so animating with this generation of college students?”
Bruni said, “You know, a lot of college students in this generation, there’s a sort of paradigm they use or a lens they use to kind of evaluate the world. And it’s one in which people who have less money, people who have less power, sometimes people who have darker skin must inherently be being wronged and are therefore most likely to be in the right.
Hoover said, “So they’re predisposed to take the side of what they deem the little guy based on those paradigms?”
Bruni said, “They are, and I think you saw that play out after October 7. Listen, I mean, there’s obviously a righteous case to be made for Palestinians deserving our attention, our empathy, our activism, et cetera. But if you looked at what happened right after October 7th, you saw a lot of young people, a lot of young people on the progressive left, ‘social justice warriors,’ they’re sometimes called, you saw them not even take a moment to really acknowledge what had happened in Israel and how horrific that was. They just kind of immediately applied this paradigm and began advocating not just for Palestinians, but in a perverse way, at times, for Hamas.”
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