A Call to Extinction

In the clip below, Hillary Clinton asks about college students from around the world "Where are they getting their information?" She found in speaking to college students

They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok. That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7th. What happened in the, you know, days, weeks, and months to follow that is a serious problem. It's a serious problem for democracy, whether it's Israel or the United States. It's a serious   problem for our young people.

Though she recognizes a particular obstacle to understanding the Middle East, Clinton realizes it's a serious problem for understanding current events generally. Oddly- or maybe not so oddly- some people disagree.

Hillary Clinton has crawled out of her cave to accuse young people of not knowing the truth about Israel because of “social media.”

She is full of shit.

Social media didn’t drop the bombs on Gaza. Israel did & the U.S. supplied them.

FREE PALESTINE. pic.twitter.com/63e9dL4N5B

— Power to the People ☭🕊 (@ProudSocialist) December 2, 2025

A few days ago, Pew Research Center reported

Adults under 30 are much more likely to get news on social media than older adults. There is a 48 percentage point gap between the shares of Americans ages 18 to 29 and those 65 and older who get news on social media at least sometimes (76% vs. 28%).

Compared with older adults, young adults are especially likely to get news from Instagram and TikTok. The difference is stark even between those ages 18 to 29 and the next oldest age group, ages 30 to 49.

The tweeter isn't primarily concerned with whether young people get most of their information about current events from social media. However, it is a major part of this argument because, were he to concede social media's impact, he's have to acknowledge the effect of an incredible (in the correct sense of the term) source.

The former Senator and Secretary of State continued

I was talking to (Bush 43 Secretary of State) Condi Rice and you know, she said in an interview that I did after the 2-point peace plan came out, she and I were in CBS and she said when people were chanting "from the river to the sea," she would ask the students "what river, what sea" and they didn't know. I had the same experience.

It's impossible to determine the veracity of the claim that many students Rice and Clinton spoke to didn't know what river and what sea the chant pertained to. Nonetheless, there is plenty of reason to believe that this was their experience and that it was not coincidental. In a poll commissioned in late 2013- after the Israel/Hamas war began- the Wall Street Journal commissioned a poll which found that 86% of students supported the chant.  However

less than half (47%) were able to name the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as the boundaries that the controversial chant was talking about.

Other students polled gave answers including the Nile and the Euphrates rivers, the Dead Sea and even the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

They didn't know what the chant pertained to, yet they supported it. They didn't know that if there is a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, it would encompass the occupied territory of the West Bank, the territory known as the Gaza Strip, and Israel proper.

It's likely, therefore, that they didn't know that Gaza was controlled by Hamas, elected in 2006 and at the time serving in the 17th year of their four-year term. It is even less likely that they understood that Arabs in Israel proper enjoy more rights than they do in any other nation in the Middle East.

And it is a safe bet they didn't know that the "Palestinian" is a term originating relatively recently for political purposes. Nor would they understand that Israelis, living on the historical land of Palestine, are Palestinians while "Palestinians" living in the diaspora are not Palestinian but Arabs who are residents of Jordan or other nations. 

But it's likely they do understand that "from the river to the sea" is a shortened version of "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Thus, most of the pro-"Palestine" crowd know that a "free Palestine" would amount to a "no more Israel."  They do know that Israel is the designated Jewish state, created because of past wrongs committed against Jews, especially in Nazi German. (Jews did not generally fare well in most of the Arab world, either, but anyone under 60 or so can be forgiven for not knowing that.)

In late September, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, and Portugal recognized a state of Palestine announced plans to recognize "Palestine." Soon afterward, Israel launched a military strike against Qatar, ostensibly to kill Hamas officials who were meeting there. Shortly afterward, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire, euphemistically referred to as a "20-point peace plan."

France apparently defined "Palestine" as including the West Bank and Gaza. Great Britain referred to the "occupied territories," presumably the West Bank and Gaza, which is governed by Hamas.  The United Nations currently gives "permanent observer" status to the Palestinian Authority, which is the governing authority in the West Bank and only the West Bank. 

This is a muddled situation because "Palestinians" has become an operative term only in the past few decades, as it has become politically useful messaging. However, the ancient land of Palestine encompassed everything from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The slogan "from the river to the sea" or "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" pertains to the entire area and evisceration of the State of Israel.

As usual, Hillary Clinton was right, in this case about two things:. the ignorance of many college students about a Palestinian state and about social media's impact. And that is a much greater problem.  

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