No wonder college students can turn against Israel

If they don't know the basics about the Holocaust, how can they be expected to know anything about Israel besides the poison that they are exposed to on campus?

A Pennsylvania woman set out with a video camera to learn what college students in her state know about the Holocaust — and discovered an incredible lack of knowledge not only of the genocide of the Jews, but of basic facts about U.S. history and World War II.

Rhonda Fink-Whitman visited college campuses in Pennsylvania this fall, including the venerated Ivy League institution the University of Pennsylvania, where she was repeatedly faced with a remarkable ignorance about events that took place in the last century.

Students didn’t know where Normandy was, why U.S. forces landed there, why the U.S. even entered the war or who was president at the time. (Wilson, Eisenhower and JFK were among the guesses.) One student didn’t know who Anne Frank was, because he said he never read the book.

Another student thought African Americans may have been targeted in the Holocaust.

Fink-Whitman started her interviews with the simple question, “What was the Holocaust?” Here are some of the answers she heard:

“Uh, I’m on the spot now.”
“It was a, uh, I don’t know how to say it like. It was something that happened in. Oh my God, I know the answer but I don’t know how to explain it.”
“I have no idea.”
“I have no idea … is it Europe? I don’t think so.”
She also asked which country Adolf Hitler was the leader of:

“Amsterdam?”
“I forget.”