You’ve Got to be Taught to Hate

Cal Thomas, Tribune Content Agency on May 27, 2025

While contemplating the horror of two young and soon to be engaged Israeli Embassy employees who were gunned down by a man shouting “free Palestine” and “I did it for Gaza,” outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., last week, I recalled the opening line to a song from the old off-Broadway musical “The Fantasticks” – “You wonder how these things begin.” That song speaks to the love between a boy and a girl. Applied to the Washington shootings it makes you wonder how hate begins.

Theologically it goes back to the Garden of Eden, but in modern times it begins at certain universities and bigoted social media sites.

The hatred of Jews is not new. It extends back several millennia. That so many universities tolerate and some professors promote Jewish hatred is not free speech. It is incitement which, taken at the extreme as it was last week, leads to murder. The people responsible for this cannot wash their hands of the blood of those innocents, any more than Pontius Pilate could exonerate himself from Christ’s crucifixion by Roman soldiers by symbolically washing his hands and claiming, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.”

I have raised this question before, but it is worth repeating. Why do the media never ask who is underwriting these demonstrations, including paying for tents, printed signs and any travel, accommodations and food for those who come from out of town? How many of the demonstrators are not students? Chants of “from the river to the sea,” especially when the few who are interviewed can’t identify the river or the sea is code for destroying Israel and justifying the killing of Jews. Consider the reluctance of some who refused – or slowly waited to comment on last week’s shootings, including some Democrats in Congress.

Until President Trump began depriving Harvard and other elite schools of federal grants, these institutions were getting away with effectively being accessories to murder. Would these university presidents, who have done little or nothing to curtail the hateful demonstrations, have tolerated KKK rallies on their campuses? Not likely. Some alumni have stopped giving to their alma maters. More should. Parents should pull their kids out of these pricey schools or not send them there. It is amazing that some parents are shocked to see their children adopt ideas that contradict their fundamental values. What did they expect?

Some historians date the start of persecution, violence, attempts at genocide and deportations of Jews to the Neo-Babylonian Empire (605 BC). There are ongoing debates and discussions why this small group of people have been singled out over the centuries as the cause of everything bad, especially when they have contributed so much to the world that is objectively good.

The Jewish lyricist Oscar Hammerstein may have gotten to the heart of it when he wrote “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” for the musical “South Pacific.” Here is part of the lyric, which readers should Google and read in its entirety:

“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught from year to year,

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—

You’ve got to be carefully taught!”

The alleged killer of those two embassy employees (if convicted, he should get the federal death penalty), the terrorist murders of Jews in Israel by Hamas and Iran’s Houthi proxies, the vilification of Jews by professors at certain universities, are instructing a new generation to hate. The universities that tolerate hate should be punished more than just depriving their schools of grants. The professors who poison young minds should be fired, hate groups banished from campuses and the country, and the demonstrators held accountable.

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Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I've Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America" (HumanixBooks).