The Far-Left’s obsession with victimhood is making minorities less safe.
It makes no moral sense — until you recognize the real ideology at play: stay oppressed, or be villainized. Liberation is only acceptable if it never actually arrives.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Matthew Nouriel, an LGBTQ+, Iranian, and Jewish writer and activist.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Why is Jewish survival treated like a threat, and why is Palestinian suffering glorified over Palestinian freedom?
I’ve watched this play out firsthand — in comment sections, on campuses, and in conversations that erase people like me simply for refusing to stay a victim.
This essay examines the dangerous standard now shaping Far-Left activism: Empowerment disqualifies you from inclusion, and survival itself is framed as aggression.
There’s a dangerous standard at the heart of Far-Left ideology: Minorities are only seen as valid if they stay victims. This isn’t some fringe belief; it’s a core component of a worldview that’s growing louder and more accepted.
Rebuild your life? Reclaim dignity? Gain power or safety? Suddenly, you’re not “oppressed” enough to count. You’re erased from the narrative. You’re accused of being “the oppressor.”
That’s not liberation; that’s ideological control.
I saw it firsthand in one of my recent Instagram posts. A commenter scoffed, “What oppressed group can weaponize the police?” — as if the Jewish struggle vanished the moment we secured even the most basic safety, as if centuries of exile, pogroms, and genocide are erased because Jews refuse to remain powerless.
This mindset isn’t just corrosive; it’s lethal.
Within a matter of days, two shocking antisemitic attacks took place in the United States. Two Israeli embassy employees, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were executed in cold blood outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Their killer shouted “Free Palestine” as he was arrested — caught on video yelling the slogan as police took him into custody.
Here’s the cruel irony: They had just left an event dedicated to humanitarian aid and interfaith dialogue, specifically supporting relief efforts in Gaza. They were working for peace. And for that, they were murdered.
Then, in Boulder, Colorado, Jewish community members peacefully marching for the release of Israeli hostages were attacked with Molotov cocktails and a makeshift flamethrower. The assailant, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, injured 15 people, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. He told authorities he had planned the attack for a year, intending to “kill all Zionist people.”
What was the response?
Influencers with millions of followers took to social media to justify the killings, to rationalize them, to frame them as understandable, even righteous, under the guise of “resistance.”
Why? Because they’ve created a villain of the highest order in Zionism, a movement that achieved everything the Far-Left claims to support: anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, land back, liberation, and survival in the face of genocide.
But instead of celebrating it, they demonize it. They compare it to Nazism. They use it to justify murder.
It makes no moral sense — until you recognize the real ideology at play: stay oppressed, or be villainized. Liberation is only acceptable if it never actually arrives.
All of this is wrapped in the language of “Free Palestine.” But the truth is: “Palestine” could have been free. Peace was offered. Statehood was offered. Coexistence was possible. But again and again, it was rejected — because war, martyrdom, and rejectionism were chosen by Palestinians instead.
Liberation is in their hands, and they’ve refused it. That’s not oppression; it’s self-imposed. And that’s exactly why the Far-Left has elevated the Palestinian cause into a symbol of its worldview: permanent struggle over resolution, endless conflict over compromise. In their eyes, you’re only worthy if you stay broken.
The Palestinians have become the perfect poster children for this ideology. Held up as eternal victims, despite initiating every major war with Israel and choosing conflict over coexistence, their cause has become sacred — not because it demands liberation, but because it refuses it.
They are not victims of Zionism; they are victims of Islamist imperialism, an imperialism that has succeeded across much of the region, but failed in one place: Israel. And that failure is intolerable. Instead of holding Palestinian leadership accountable, the world blames Israel for refusing to submit, for surviving, for thriving.
Israel’s refusal to be destroyed is framed as aggression. Its determination to live is treated as violence. And its Jewish citizens are told that their empowerment disqualifies them from being seen as human.
In the end, it’s the Palestinians themselves who pay the highest price — trapped in a cycle of violence, failed leadership, and endless war, all in service of a cause that demands their suffering over their liberation.
Meanwhile, Jews are accused of being too privileged. But who are they talking about? The Jews who arrived in America fleeing pogroms, the Holocaust, and war — arriving with nothing but trauma and desperation? The 850,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab lands — stripped of citizenship, land, and identity by Arab nationalist regimes often infused with Islamist ideology, now reframed by the Far-Left as anti-colonial?
We weren’t handed power; we fought for it. We rebuilt. We survived. And now, because we’ve refused to stay victims, we’re told we no longer qualify as oppressed. It’s an impossible standard, and a revealing one. If empowerment disqualifies you, then oppression isn’t something these ideologues want to end; it’s something they need to preserve.
Because victimhood is their currency. It’s how they gate-keep inclusion. It’s how they maintain control.
And I say all of this as someone whose very identity should matter to those who claim to care about justice. I’m gay, I’m Iranian, I’m Jewish.
The regime in Iran, an antisemitic theocracy, didn’t issue a formal expulsion. It didn’t have to. It reinstated the humiliations of dhimmitude through fear, surveillance, executions, and systemic discrimination — driving 90 percent of Iran’s Jewish population into exile. And it murders people like me (gay Iranians) publicly, with impunity. You would think that would be worth talking about.
But they don’t. Not because they’re unaware, but because they’ve decided it’s not their fight.
Influencers and activists have said outright that we shouldn’t “judge gay rights by a Western standard.” In other words, equality is worth fighting for here, but not for the LGBTQ activists risking their lives every single day in the Middle East and North Africa. He’s effectively saying gay rights are good enough for him, but not for them. Talk about privilege. My rights become negotiable depending on the region. My life matters less — because challenging non-Western oppressors makes them uncomfortable.
I can’t think of a more blatant example of the racism of low expectations. This is the price of a narrative that demands Jews stay silent. This is what happens when empowerment is framed as oppression, and survival as violence. It doesn’t just distort discourse; it endangers lives.
I’m not embraced unless I reduce myself to a victim, unless I denounce my Jewish pride, unless I stay silent about the Islamic Republic, unless I make myself small and digestible — just another checkbox in their curated display of “marginalized voices.”
But I refuse.
I won’t dilute myself to be palatable. I won’t apologize for surviving, for being proud, or for speaking hard truths. And ironically, it’s that refusal — that dignity — that makes me more of a target.
Because, in the end, this was never about justice. It was never about protecting minorities. It is about controlling them.
 | A guest post by
|
In his films, Alfred Hitchcock used a plot device called a MacGuffin, which is defined as an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.
And for Westerners of the Social Justice faith, their entire cast of rotating sacred victims—the black and brown, the Trans child, the migrant, the mythical Palestinian and especially their children and infants—are also a MacGuffin, meaning that their actual welfare and circumstances are only a pretext, whereas the real goal is for the Westerner to parade their moral vanity, display how kind, wise and compassionate they are (esp as compared to their political enemies) and to appropriate the suffering of distant strangers in the hope of increasing their social and political power.
This is easy to prove: when all the cool kids were chanting "Defund the Police", supposedly as a way to help poor black people, did anyone consult them? Did anyone happen to notice that this was a very unpopular idea among the sacred victims the saviors were claiming to speak on behalf of? That no one in a dangerous neighborhood wants FEWER cops!?
And now of course there's the newest must-have item for our age of conspicuous compassion, the Palestinian child or infant. When chanting "Free Palestine" does anyone stop to ask—free them from what exactly? How could any Palestinian be free when they're ruled by a theocratic kleptocratic dictatorship? Is Israel really the cause of Palestinian misery or could it be the world's worst leaders combined with a culture fixated on toxic Jew hate? But to ask hard questions is to face a complicated reality, whereas to join a mob and chant simplistic slogans makes the chanters feel righteous and SEEN.
The Palestinians are simply the latest MacGuffin of the Social Justice faith and the social media age, where the suffering of distant strangers is a valuable resource that also serves as a trendy commodity for people hoping to get ahead by publicly atoning. The victims and their circumstances are irrelevant, all that matters is the crusade for attention disguised as a political cause.
It’s an ideology that not only never logically coheres, but it’s profoundly racist as well. Have you ever noticed how “vaguely brown” people are never the oppressors - e.g., tell a person on the Left how Islam (historically Arabs) is, over time, the most oppressive regime in history, and they’ll look at you in stunned bewilderment (or more likely they’ll scream at you for being racist, which is clearly a projection of their own reverse racism).
PS - and that’ll happen before you even have the chance to point out that Islam is not a race, and that the world has never had a problem with non-Muslim Arabs.