“Only 16% of students who ‘care deeply’ about the Palestinian issue provided the correct decade for the Six Day War and only 17% were able to guess that the population of Israel was somewhere between 8 and 12 million people,” Hassner shared. “The others offered guesses ranging from as low as 100,000 persons to as high as 150 million persons.”
Ron Hassner, who is the departmental chair in Israel Studies at UC Berkeley, has released the results of a survey he conducted at the university among students who identify themselves as being “passionate” about the issue of the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories”. Basically speaking, they are basically uninterested in other Middle East conflicts and woefully ignorant about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And the timing could not have been worse since the campus is still recovering from the latest disturbances surrounding Ann Coulter’s speaking appearance there on November 20.
Of course, this ignorance is not limited to UC Berkeley, but it just goes to prove my “peer-reviewed” thesis: A degree from UC Berkeley prepares you for nothing more than to join the street people on Telegraph Avenue.