Oded J. K. Faran & Walter E. Block
See Part 1 HERE
Hannah Arendt observed that “the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” (Arendt, 1977). The contemporary activist Left has made up its mind. It has simply selected the wrong target. Its moral compass does orient toward suffering, but only in the most selective sense. It orients toward Jews with remarkable precision.
If your feminism activates for gender issues globally but falls silent when Iranian women burn hijabs and face execution, (Amnesty International, 2025) you possess a gender-themed instrument for other purposes rather than feminist principles. If your anti-imperialism eloquently opposes American or Israeli policy but finds no vocabulary for Persian regional domination, you have simply branded your specific obsessions in universalist language. If your human rights advocacy operates at full intensity for Palestinian grievances but offers nothing for Iranians fighting actual tyranny, your advocacy serves purposes other than human rights.
This argument does not suggest that Israel should be immune from criticism or that every Israeli policy stands beyond scrutiny. Democratic states should face robust critique, and Israel is no exception. The problem emerges in the systematic erasure of other victims to maintain singular focus. Iranians fighting for elementary freedoms become invisible because their oppressors cannot be connected to Jews. This makes Iranian suffering inconvenient, narratively useless, and ultimately dispensable in the activist economy.
The silence is deliberate and structural. It constitutes strategy rather than hypocrisy in the conventional sense, which implies inconsistency between stated values and actual behavior. Iranians are denied solidarity because extending it would dilute focus on the only target that genuinely animates this movement. The appearance of principled universalism must be maintained while the practice remains obsessively particular.
State it plainly: No Jews, No News.
The proof arrives on schedule. One need only wait for the next conflict involving Israel, regardless of who initiates it or what the underlying facts are. Watch how instantly the dormant machinery revives. The emergency resolutions, the campus occupations, the breathless media coverage, the corporate statements, the academic petitions, all the moral certainty that was mysteriously unavailable for Iranian protesters will manifest immediately and in overwhelming force.
The pattern serves as the evidence. The silence constitutes the scandal. And the pretense that this pattern remains invisible, inconsistent, or unrevealing represents its own form of complicity. Burke’s warning about good men doing nothing applies with particular force to good people who claim to notice everything except the one pattern that might complicate their worldview.
There is a rock n’ roll song from the last century with the lyrics: “Why’s everyone always pickin’ on me? (Bloodhound Gang, 1996). Accordingly, we ask, why is everyone always picking on the Jews. This is important to understand. Enquiring minds, presented with the aforementioned evidence that this claim is so, will naturally want to know why it is the case. Further, if we are to be doing something to end this injustice, it behooves us to know why it occurs in the first place.
There are several hypotheses which might be considered. First and foremost is the claim that the Jews killed Christ. This may not mean too such for non-Christians, but it would be surprising if it played no role at all in that religious community. Further, much of Europe is comprised of Christian nations. They play a disproportionate role in the deliberations of the United Nations, which, we have seen, is disproportionately predisposed to blame Israel, and to ignore other, more serious conflagrations. This cannot help but be a part of the explanation for Jew-hatred.
Second, consider the following: the Left sees Jews as “white,” Western, and powerful. Their very success as a nation or as individuals proves to them that they are in fact the “whitest of the white.” They fervently believe that all cultures are equal. If one culture has greater accomplishments than any other, it can only be because of the disproportionate and unfair power they possess. Their success is based upon taking from the oppressed. The Jews are also small in number, and so therefore vulnerable. The critics pick upon Jews rather than any other nation because they think they can win, or at least drastically change them. With almost half of all Jews sympathetic with the antisemites, they might well be right.
Then there is the phenomenon that “No one likes a SmartAlec.” The Ashkenazi Jews, on average, score highest on IQ tests, of any demographic. Their contributions to intellectual pursuits such as physics, chemistry, medicine, philosophy, economics, as determined by Nobel prizes and patents (Murray, 2023) are unparalleled; to intellectual games such as chess; to pharmaceuticals (the Salk vaccine), world class. It is only human nature, on the part of many but not all people, to resent those who are smarter than you.
“Smarty pants” is not a term of approval. In high school, the class “brain” is derided, not revered. He is often a 90-pound, four-eyed weakling wearing a pocket protector for his fountain pens; he is the butt of savage humor and is bullied.
When the Jews were the proverbial 90-pound weakling, before 1948, they were reviled, kicked out of one country and then exiled from another. After that point in time, whatever they were, they were no longer frail and powerless. They were still roughly, equally loathed and detested, as per the above considerations. So the relative strength of Yiddishkeit does not seem to have played anything like an important role in the disgust with which Jews are held by the world.
What other hypotheses are there that can account for the evil phenomenon now under consideration?
Here is yet another; in many countries during the Jewish diaspora, people of the book were not allowed to enter numerous professions; engage in many lines of work. Two were almost always open to us. One of them was money lending Needles to say, the general populace greatly resented not at all the borrowing aspect, but the requirement for repayment. Indictments of “usury” filled the air. What is this? Charging a higher rate of interest than that arbitrarily decided by a third party. Also garnering great bitterness was assistance with governmental tax gathering. Combine these two elements, and you have a recipe for pogroms.
To be Concluded in Part 3 Next Sunday
References
Amnesty International. (2025, March). Iran: Authorities target women’s rights activists with arbitrary arrest, flogging and death penalty. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/03/iran-authorities-target-womens-rights-activists-with-arbitrary-arrest-flogging-and-death-penalty/
Arendt, H. (1977). The life of the mind. Houghton Mifflin.
Bloodhound Gang. (1996). Why’s everybody always pickin’ on me? [Song]. On One Fierce Beer Coaster.
Fischer, D., & Block, W. E. (2021, October 21). Launching missiles. Arutz Sheva. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/315456
Human Rights Watch. (2025, January 16). World report 2025: Iran. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/iran
Mill, J. S. (1867). Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
Murray, C. (2003). Human accomplishment: The pursuit of excellence in the arts and sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. HarperCollins.
Murray, C. (2007, April 1). Jewish genius. Commentary Magazine. https://www.commentary.org/articles/charles-murray/jewish-genius/
Quote Investigator. (2010, December 4). The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/04/good-men-do/
Shakespeare, W. (2023). The merchant of Venice. Royal Shakespeare Company. (Original work published 1600).
Staff, T. O. I. (2023, January). Israel ranks among 10 most powerful countries in annual list; 4th strongest military. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-among-10-most-powerful-countries-in-the-world-in-annual-list/
UN Watch. (2024, November). 2024 UNGA resolutions on Israel vs. rest of the world. https://unwatch.org/2024-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-of-the-world/
UN Watch. (2024, December 19). UN condemns Israel 17 times, rest of world combined 6 times. https://unwatch.org/un-condemns-israel-17-times-6-on-rest-of-world-combined/
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