More than one in five American college undergraduates say the United States deserved the September 11 attacks, a new national survey has found.
The Buckley Institute polled 803 full-time students under 25 at four-year colleges between September 5 and 14. Twenty-two percent agreed that America deserved 9/11, 72 percent rejected the idea, and 6 percent were unsure. None of these students were alive when al-Qaeda hijackers killed nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001.
The finding sits inside a wider leftward shift the same survey captured. Asked whether they would rather live under socialism or capitalism, 42 percent chose socialism and just 28 percent capitalism, the widest gap in the five years the institute has posed the question. On the Middle East, 38 percent named Palestine as a better ally for the United States than Israel, picked by 25 percent, a nine-point swing in a single year.
'This year's survey demonstrates that censorious attitudes remain stubbornly high on America's college campuses,' said Lauren Noble, the institute's founder and executive director. 'During the 250th anniversary of America's founding, America's college students have swung heavily in favor of socialism.' The margin of error is 3.5 percentage points.