Hillary Clinton terms US campus protests ‘propaganda’, ‘lack of knowledge’

Former US States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has slammed campus protests across the country, over the Gaza war, saying the young people (students) do not know much about the history of the Middle East.

Clinton also termed students ignorant and alleged they were being misinformed by propaganda on social media. In an interview with MSNBC, Hillary Clinton agreed with host Charles Joseph Scarborough, who said, “mainstream students were getting propagandised whether it’s from their professors, or whether it’s from the communist Chinese government, through TikTok, calling the President of the United States ‘genocide Joe’.”

In response, Clinton said, “I have had many conversations, as you’ve had, with a lot of young people over the last many months now, and… they don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”

“Propaganda is not education,” she said, adding, “propaganda… whether it’s TikTok, or in the classroom, is actually the opposite of education.”

“Anybody who is teaching in a university or anyone who is putting content on social media should be held responsible for what they include and what they exclude. So much of what we’re seeing, particularly on TikTok, about what’s going on in the Middle East is wilfully false, but it’s also incredibly slanted, pro-Hamas, anti-Israel,” Hillary Clinton said.

“With respect to the Middle East, they don’t know that under the bringing together for the Israelis and the Palestinians by my husband (former US President Bill Clinton), then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, the then-head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation Yasser Arafat — an offer was made to the Palestinians for a state on 96 per cent of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians with 4 per cent of Israel to be given to reach 100 per cent of the amount of territory that was hoped for,” Clinton said.

“This offer was made and if Yasser Arafat had accepted it there would have been a Palestinian state now for about 24 years. It’s one of the great tragedies of history that he was unable to say, ‘yes’,” Clinton laments.

“My husband has a book coming out later this year in which he talks about how Arafat kept saying that he intended to agree, he wanted to agree, but he was pretty sure he’d be killed because Sadat was killed by extremists when he made peace with Israel.”

“Our dear, dear friend, Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a radical Israeli when he was pursuing the two-state solution.”

“So… this is a very important piece of history to understand if you’re going to take any kind of position with respect to what’s going on right now,” she said.

Students in both the United States and Europe have been holding demonstrations calling for an immediate permanent ceasefire and for schools to cut financial ties with companies they say are profiting from the oppression of Palestinians.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan authorities, and triggered a catastrophic humanitarian crisis and famine threatening the enclave’s 2.5 million residents.

The war began when the militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.