There is a particular species of ignorance that flourishes in the academy: one that mistakes moral posturing for moral reasoning, slogans for scholarship, and fashionable outrage for historical understanding. Zohran Mamdani, now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, represents the perfected specimen of this breed: the educated barbarian.

Consider the extraordinary trajectory that led us here. A man who praised Hamas financiers in rap songs, who declared Israel guilty of genocide within days of October 7, who promises to arrest foreign leaders based on his interpretation of international law — this man now stands poised to govern America’s largest city. He is not some fringe radical clawing his way up from the margins. He is the product of Bowdoin College, one of our finest liberal arts institutions, where his worldview was carefully cultivated and his activism legitimized. (RELATED: Mamdani’s Victory Proves the Dems Have Abandoned Jews)

The pathology began early. At Bowdoin, Mamdani co-founded the college’s first Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which invited As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor who would later declare that America “made its bed” with the September 11 attacks and had “inflicted many 9/11s on people around the world.” This was not youthful indiscretion but institutional validation: a prestigious liberal arts college providing a platform for someone who celebrated George Habash, dubbed “the godfather of Middle East terrorism.”

Mamdani’s education exemplifies a broader institutional failure. Recent surveys reveal the staggering scope of historical ignorance among young Americans. Nearly half of millennials cannot name a single concentration camp from the more than 40,000 that existed during the Holocaust. In New York — Mamdani’s own state — an astounding 58 percent cannot identify even one. When 63 percent of young Americans don’t know that six million Jews were murdered, and 36 percent believe the number was two million or fewer, we confront an educational catastrophe. (RELATED: Trump v. Harvard: Battle of the Heavyweights)

Most disturbing of all: 19 percent of New York’s millennials believe Jews caused the Holocaust — the highest rate in the nation. Such ignorance doesn’t emerge spontaneously. It requires systematic cultivation by institutions that have abandoned their responsibility to transmit historical truth.

When universities teach students to think in analogies rather than facts, the Holocaust becomes just another data point in the catalog of historical grievances. The systematic, industrial extermination of six million Jews — planned in conference rooms, executed with bureaucratic precision, documented with chilling thoroughness — gets flattened into a generic template. Any military operation that generates tragic headlines can now bear the label of genocide. (RELATED: Let Colleges Fail: Use Creative Destruction)

Mamdani embodies this dangerous alchemy perfectly. When he speaks of “genocide” in Gaza, he does so with the confidence of someone who knows the words but not the music, the terminology but not the truth. He wields the vocabulary of atrocity without comprehending its meaning, transforming historical illiteracy into moral certainty.

The stakes of such ignorance were made starkly clear this month when two world leaders who understood the lessons of history acted decisively to prevent another catastrophe. When President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu recognized that Iran’s nuclear program posed an existential threat to the Jewish homeland, they coordinated strikes against Tehran’s nuclear facilities. “We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before,” Trump declared, “and we’ve gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.” This was “Never Again” in practice — not as a slogan but as a solemn commitment requiring vigilance and, when necessary, action.

The contrast with our universities could not be starker. While Trump and Netanyahu acted on the hard-won wisdom of the 20th century, our academic institutions continue producing graduates who cannot distinguish between the Holocaust and contemporary conflicts. The intellectual architecture that creates such distortion is deliberate. Universities have created safe havens for professors like AbuKhalil, who can claim Israel practices worse terrorism than Hamas without facing serious academic scrutiny. They have normalized rhetoric that equates democratic self-defense with terrorist violence, teaching students that moral relativism represents sophisticated analysis.

Holocaust Education

In their zeal to diversify curricula and amplify marginalized voices, these institutions have marginalized the one historical event that most demands sustained attention. Holocaust education, when it exists at all, gets subsumed into broader discussions that dilute its unique horror. Students learn that all suffering is equivalent, all victims interchangeable, all perpetrators merely products of circumstance.

The results speak for themselves. When nearly half of young Americans cannot name Auschwitz, when basic historical facts disappear into academic fashions, we create a generation vulnerable to the very ideologies that once nearly destroyed civilization. Such students can lecture Jewish audiences about their own fears while promoting the very rhetoric that generates those fears — academic arrogance perfected.

The remedy is both simple and radical: mandatory Holocaust education in every university — not merely as a graduate program but as a required undergraduate course. Students should study the Wannsee Conference minutes, read Eichmann’s testimony, examine the railway schedules that carried millions to their deaths. They should understand that when Nazi officials spoke of the “final solution,” they meant exactly what they said.

The data demands urgency. When 80 percent of Americans believe Holocaust education is important to prevent future atrocities, yet basic knowledge continues to erode, universities have failed their most fundamental duty. When 59 percent believe something like the Holocaust could happen again, ignorance becomes not merely academic failure but civilizational peril.

Students must learn that “Never Again” is not a slogan but a promise — one that requires the vigilance that comes only from knowledge, not the activism that comes from ignorance. Without such grounding, universities will continue producing figures like Mamdani: absolutely confident in their moral superiority, completely ignorant of their historical blindness.

Mamdani did not emerge from a vacuum. He represents what happens when prestigious institutions shape young minds without anchoring them in historical truth. His rise should terrify us not because he is uniquely dangerous, but because he is so perfectly typical of what our educational system now produces.

In the end, ignorance is not bliss. It is dangerous. And in the hands of the educated, it becomes lethal.

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