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Dukeboy01's avatar

I will directly and forthrightly declare my allegiance to and endorsement of another form of "yes- buttery:"

Yes, what Hamas did was an atrocity, but no, it is not an atrocity against me or one that should justify the intervention of my government into the conflict on my behalf. Especially since it seems clear from the very day that it happened that our blood thirsty neocon puppets like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley are prepping us to use it as an excuse to attack Iran.

Rod is correct that 10/7 is a lot like 9/11. It's being used as an excuse to move forces against a different target. They're trying to use our anger at atrocity to motivate us to attack a bigger target than a few Palestinians crammed into the open- air prison that makes up the Gaza strip. Just as the real target after 9/11 shifted from killing goatherders in the mountains of Afghanistan to rolling tanks into Iraq on the pretext of WMDs, they are running the exact playbook to get a wider war with Iran.

We fell for it once before. Rod admits that he did. I admit that I did. To the extent that the young people of 2023 who will be asked to do the fighting and dying in Tehran for the glory of the Great American Empire are saying "No," for whatever reason, I'm willing to support their decision.

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Linda Arnold's avatar

Rod,

Thank you for this amazing column. You have said what needs to be said.

I want to be of a little help, if I can. My PhD is in Mathematics Education, so I hope I have credibility when discussing numbers here. The poll you reference, **quoted in the way it was**, does not appear overly credible. You are very credible, but regarding this, I don't want to give anyone an opening to fault you.

(1) The methodology of this poll is suspect. I drilled down and found the original source, linked below. Note the following from the source – quoted below - this means, for instance, that if pollsters believe more youth side with the left, they could “weight” those responses higher.

<<<”Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, education, political party, and political ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 2%.”

>>>

(2) Next, not the lack of care in presenting results. The word “blaming” appears to be omitted in the stating the poll question -

<<<”Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?”>>>>

(3) Finally – and probably most important -this poll eliminates respondents who answered, “I don’t know”. Other polls have shown significant numbers who answer, “I don’t know”, of course, either because they truly do not know, or because they do not want the poll taker to know their opinion.

Most polls I see that break down numbers for youth and include "don't know" responses do not say a majority of youth agrees with Hamas. But you are so right to say that the number of youths supporting Hamas is heartbreakingly large. (It just does not appear to be a majority.)

(4) Strangely, here are the results of the same poll for the question <<<”Do you think that the attacks on Jews were genocidal in nature or not genocidal”>>> Ages 18-24 say genocidal 62%, not genocidal 38%. Those are not typos.

(5) And of course with a margin of error of +- 2 percent, it might not be 51-49 for Hamas. It might be 49-51 for Israel.

(6) Last - this was a survey of 2119 people. We are to "trust them" that their sample was normally distributed, and thus claims like "margin of error +/- 2%" are accurate (these claims fall apart if the distribution is not normal). But look how credible their "normally distributed" election surveys tend to be. Hmmmm.....

Link to the full poll:

https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HHP_Oct23_KeyResults.pdf

My recommendation: Look at a lot of polls, not just this one. The ones I see, that show "don't knows" do not say it is a majority of youth supporting Hamas, but again, yes, it is far too many.

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