Hillary Clinton is not backing down on her insistence that social media is giving young people a false picture of the Arab-Israeli conflict and that this phenomenon deserves a large piece of the blame for the way Gaza radicalized Americans.
TikTok, especially but not solely, she said at a conference organized by Israel Hayom, “is where they were learning about what happened on October 7, what happened in the days, weeks, and months to follow. That’s a serious problem. It’s a serious problem for democracy, whether it’s Israel or the United States, and it’s a serious problem for our young people.”
Engaging in “reasonable discussions” with younger folks became “very difficult because they did not know history, they had very little context, and what they were being told on social media was not just one-sided, it was pure propaganda.”
These viewers “are seeing short-form videos, some of them totally made up, some of them not at all representing what they claim to be showing.”
All of this is true, and the former secretary of state knows that it is true. Which is why, when pressed on her comments this week at the Doha Forum in Qatar—which is one of the more significant sources of that disinformation—she held her ground. Her questioner, Foreign Policy magazine editor Ravi Agrawal, condescendingly asked Clinton “How are you reflecting on your words and the controversy around it?”
Clinton’s response was appropriate: “Well, I think it is a provable fact that most Americans and an even bigger percentage of young Americans get their news from social media. If that is controversial, then people are not paying attention.”
Why, Agrawal wanted to know, was that such a bad thing? Clinton answered that in her many conversations with students (she teaches a course at Columbia) and activists, “they did not always know why they were saying what they said.”
This is an unusually lucid characterization of the problem. It’s worth expanding on the idea that these young anti-Israel people don’t “always know why” they say what they say about the conflict. The Doha Forum, in fact, provides a perfect example: Tucker Carlson, who also spoke at the conference.
Carlson is a good case study for another reason. He plays a game in which he’ll say something anti-Semitic and when he is criticized for his bigotry he will respond, in effect, You see? They tell you I’m evil but not that I’m wrong.
But Tucker is wrong. Carlson promoted his chummy Doha conversation with the Qatari prime minister on X with the following pinned post: “No American president has ever sided with an Arab state over Israel until Donald Trump forced Bibi to apologize to Qatar. A reaction from Qatar’s PM.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman corrected Carlson on X, pointing out that a U.S. weapons embargo on Israel persisted from Israel’s founding through three U.S. presidents; that President Eisenhower sided with Egypt in 1956; that President Reagan sold AWACs (quite famously) to Saudi Arabia over Israel’s objections; President Obama made a habit of siding against Israel’s prime minister; among many, many, many other such cases.
As one recites the very long list, it immediately becomes clear that Carlson knowingly said something ludicrous just to get a rise out of people.
Given the fact of Carlson’s bad faith, were Friedman and others wrong to engage with Carlson’s post and correct the facts? Not at all, precisely because of what Clinton was talking about. When an anti-Israel cult leader like Tucker says something like that, you can expect to hear it repeated by a legion of followers and boosted by a legion of bots. It’s exactly the kind of insane declaration that pro-Hamas activists would yell at you or tweet at you in large numbers during the war, whether they’re on the woke right or at Columbia University. So no matter how bad Tucker’s faith, the assertion can’t go unanswered.
Perhaps most important, Ravi Agrawal’s magazine is as establishment as it gets, and in his remarks to Clinton, he defended mainstream media reporting on Gaza. Tucker could be sitting in Agrawal’s place and not much would have changed about the conversation. Doha is where the two ends of the horseshoe get too close to each other to tell them apart. Whether someone is evil is entirely subjective. But that Tucker Carlson and Ravi Agrawal are both wrong on the facts is the plain, objective truth. And the truth still matters.
