HoodaThunk?

Instapundit has a link up to a clip from ABC’s The View where he quotes Ralph Luker of the History News Network. Ralph says:

If you’ve devoted your professional career to teaching World History or Western Civ, you might rather slit your wrist now than watch this clip from ABC’s “The View.”

Glen Reynolds adds that some of non-professionals might feel the same way, and I damn near do. Watch the clip, by all means, because it’ll convey the non-verbals going on here. In order to comment on it, however, I’m going to tell you what the deal is.

I get the impression they were beginning to enter into a discussion that involved the ancient Greeks and their pantheon. The clip starts with Whoopi Goldberg is apparently making the assertion that the people they were about to discuss were living before the time of Jesus Christ. That’s when Sherri Shepherd gets involved and makes a rock-solid, with-100%-conviction statement that no, Jesus came first. When the rest of the hosts tried to correct her, she boldly states that “Nothing came before Jesus Christ.”

Um, hello? Let’s just stick to the Bible for this one, for a moment. Ever heard of, say, Moses? Abraham? David? Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt?

Charleton Heston ring a bell? Parting the Red Sea?

The fact that there were people around – and the ancient Greeks were certainly among them – before the birth of Christ is just that: a known fact. Even the Bible explicitly notes this and we have scientific and literary evidence out the wazoo that this is true. This kind of incredibly… well, stupid assertion is just this side of impossible to believe actually occured. Were it not for the video clip, I’d have a hard time believing it myself. But there she is, an allegedly educated person, making a colossal slip-up like that on national television.

The link to Ralph’s post at the History News Network goes on with another example, this one more timely. He quotes a blog called Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk where a post relates this experience:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11.

The thing that upsets me most here is that the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

Again with the people who think Iraq had some direct action involving the 9/11 attacks. No one who has studied even the least amount of information on 9/11 can possibly believe the Iraqis were involved, not if they were paying attention. I do believe they provided material support to Al Qaeda, possibly in the 9/11 attacks, but they were not directly involved. For those people quick blame the Bush administration for this phenomenon, President Bush was quite clear that there was no proof that Saddam was tied to the attacks.

So, here the question I’d like these academics to pose to the students who make those assertions, especially in print. Where, exactly, did they get the idea that Iraq was involved with the 9/11 attacks? This is what college students are in college for: to learn how to think. So make them do it and maybe next time they’ll be a bit more careful in what they cite in their arguments.