Oded J. K. Faran & Walter E. Block
Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill. Image created by AI
Abstract
The international Left prides itself on opposing tyranny, defending human rights, and standing with the oppressed. Yet when Iranians risk imprisonment and execution to challenge a theocratic dictatorship, global mobilization is faint. When Israel or Jews are implicated in conflict, outrage becomes immediate and absolute. This paper argues that this disparity is not episodic but systematic. The pattern can be summarized: No Jews, No News. The evidence is not hidden. United Nations resolutions and mainstream human rights reports make clear how condemnation gathers where Israel is involved and dissipates elsewhere. The roots of this asymmetry are historically and ideologically, embedded in currents of antisemitism. The issue is not whether Israel may be criticized. The issue is whether similar injustices elsewhere stir the same urgency and outrage. They do not.
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Edmund Burke is often credited with warning that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” (a haunting phrase Burke never actually wrote, though history has insisted on placing it in his mouth). The sentiment traces instead to John Stuart Mill’s 1867 observation that “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”. (Mill, 1867) The misattribution itself reveals something about our hunger for moral clarity from the past. But whether Burke said it or Mill did, the principle stands. And its corollary matters more: silence is never neutral. It always chooses. It always takes sides.
Consider the current Iranian uprising. For weeks, ordinary Iranians have mounted extraordinary resistance against one of the world’s most repressive regimes. Women have burned hijabs in public squares, knowing the penalty is death. (Amnesty International, 2025). Students have disappeared into Evin Prison’s documented torture chambers. (Human Rights Watch, 2025). Families have been systematically destroyed. The courage on display is genuine, the risks are mortal, and the cause meets every criterion the international Left claims to champion: resistance to theocratic tyranny, women’s liberation, democratic aspiration, opposition to state violence.
Yet the machinery of global progressive activism remains conspicuously inert. No emergency sessions at the United Nations. No solidarity flotillas. No campus encampments. No celebrity arrests outside Iranian consulates. The infrastructure of outrage that activates so predictably for certain causes has failed to engage.
The pattern has become too consistent to dismiss as coincidence. When Uyghurs documented genocide in Xinjiang, the response was careful, qualified, and muted. When Yemenis suffered under Houthi rule, sympathy arrived in whispers if at all. When Rohingya Muslims faced ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, international progressive movements offered statements but little sustained mobilization. When Iranians now fight for basic freedoms, the international Left offers sustained silence.
But when Jews are involved in any capacity, particularly when Israel can be implicated, the response transforms entirely. Outrage becomes instant, comprehensive, and morally absolute. Resolutions proliferate. Hashtags trend globally. Celebrities compete for symbolic arrests. Academic conferences convene. The moral certainty that was somehow unavailable for Tehran, Urumqi, or Sana’a materializes immediately and completely.
The contrast becomes obscene when placed beside the Palestinian cause. Why does a terrorist uprising against a democratic state generate sustained global solidarity while an authentic popular revolt against totalitarian theocracy generates silence? What makes Palestinian resistance sacred while Iranian resistance remains invisible? The Iranian people face execution for demanding basic rights. They challenge an actual police state that tortures dissidents, hangs protesters, and shoots women in the streets for showing their hair. Their oppression is systematic, their suffering is documented, their courage is undeniable. Yet they receive no flotillas, no campus protests, no celebrity advocacy, no emergency sessions.
Palestinian militancy, by contrast, generates immediate international mobilization even when it takes the form of deliberate attacks on civilians. The difference cannot be explained by the scale of suffering, the legitimacy of grievances, or the nature of resistance. What do Palestinians possess that Iranians lack? The answer presents itself with uncomfortable clarity: an enemy that can be identified as Jewish. Iranian protesters offer no such utility. Their oppressors cannot be connected to Israel, their struggle cannot be instrumentalized against Jews, their cause provides no occasion for the particular moral theatre that animates contemporary progressive politics. They are, in the most clinical sense, useless to the narrative. And so they vanish.
At this juncture, conspiracy theories typically flourish. Hidden cabals. Disproportionate influence. Secret coordination. The usual paranoid architecture.
All of it is unnecessary. The actual explanation requires no imagination, no secret meetings, no elaborate coordination. It is simpler, more visible, and ultimately more damning: No Jews, No News. The principle operates with mathematical consistency. Jewish absence correlates with attention collapse. Jewish presence correlates with attention surplus. Jewish culpability, real or imagined, generates moral certainty on demand.
Iranian protesters receive no flotillas organized by Greta Thunberg because their suffering cannot be converted into indictments of Israel. No one, at least not as of yet, blames the Israelis, or Jews in general, for the Ayatollah’s slaughter of Iranian woman who go about without a head covering. We expect to hear of this charge soon. Their courage serves no useful narrative purpose in the activist economy. Their deaths generate no applause in the auditoriums where other victims are celebrated. Their oppression fails to activate the guilt mechanisms that power much of Western progressive politics.
This is precisely why sophisticated conspiracy theorists avoid discussing NJNN. The pattern requires no hidden power structure, only selective attention and motivated reasoning. It is the one explanatory framework that refuses to flatter paranoid narratives about secret control.
The empirical evidence is overwhelming and accessible. One can simply count: UN resolutions passed, media coverage hours logged, protest attendance numbers, congressional statements issued, academic conferences held, hashtag impressions measured. In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted 17 resolutions against Israel compared to only 6 against the rest of the world combined, including one each for North Korea, Iran, Syria, Myanmar, Russia, and the United States. (UN Watch, 2024). From 2006 through 2024, the UN Human Rights Council adopted 108 resolutions against Israel, compared to 45 against Syria and only 15 against Iran. (UN Watch, 2024). The disproportion announces itself in every dataset. Iranian women removing hijabs at gunpoint generate less international outrage than Israeli housing construction announcements. State executions in Tehran, where over 400 people were executed in the first half of 2024 alone, (Human Rights Watch, 2025) warrant fewer protests than security checkpoints in Hebron. A theocratic tyranny that has killed thousands of its own citizens in recent years draws less sustained fury than a democratic state defending itself against terrorist organizations.
To be Continued in Part 2 Next Sunday
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