Stunning percent of college students 'unfamiliar' with US killing of Iran Gen. Soleimani: Survey
The poll also showed Republican students were more likely to approve of the airstrike than Democrat students.
Students were asked if they approved or disapproved of the U.S’ decision to kill General Qassem Soleimani, the margins were close to call.
A recent poll found that 49 percent of US college students disapprove of the United States’ decision to kill Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The poll also found that Republican students were more likely to favor the move than Democrat students by a wide margin.
A whopping 26 percent were “unfamiliar” with the strike against the Iranian general.
On January 3, President Donald Trump ordered an airstrike which resulted in the death of Soleimani at an airport in Baghdad. Soleimani was the General of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds force within it, which the U.S. government has designated as a terrorist organization.
Soleimani was reported to have been responsible for the killing of more than 600 American troops during the Iraq War.
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College Pulse received 1,376 responses to the poll on Soleimani’s death, which asked students, “Do you approve or disapprove of the U.S. killing top Iranian General Qassim Suleimani and five others in a pre-emptive airstrike?”
Twenty-six percent of students strongly disapproved while 23 percent somewhat disapproved. Meanwhile, another 10 percent strongly approved of Trump’s decision, while 15 percent somewhat approved. The remaining 26 percent were not familiar with the topic.
The poll found that Democrat students (12 percent) were less likely than Republican students (64 percent) to approve of the strike.
The results come even as some college professors have spoken in support of Soleimani’s killing.
Syracuse University Institute for Security Policy and Law Director of Research Corri Zoli, for example, admitted that “something had to be done” with regard to the Iranian general. University of Kansas professor Hossein Saiedian, who was born in Iran, also supports the move, according to WDAF-TV in Kansas City, Missouri.
Peter Mansoor, a professor at Ohio State University, called the fatal strike against Soleimani “justice served,” adding that the Trump administration “had to respond” to Iran’s “provocations.”
Other professors, however, have spoken in opposition to the president’s move.
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The University of Notre Dame professor Mary Ellen O’Connell, for example, told USA Today, “the United States had no justification to carry out this strike.” Washington University in St. Louis professor Leila Sadat similarly argued against the strike on Soleimani.
“First, it is worth underscoring that the intentional killing of a human being — any human being, even a so-called ‘bad guy’ — is murder,” Sadat said. “And murder is justified only under very limited circumstances, one of which is, indeed, the targeting of military personnel during a war.”
”But Iran and the United States are not at war — and if the situation were reversed and Iran began targeting high-ranking U.S. generals for execution, the U.S. would properly argue that it was acting unlawfully. So if this was not a lawful wartime killing during an ongoing war, and the United States claims it was not starting a new war, what exactly was it?” Sadat added.
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