Meet the Omnicause

Where all the world’s idiocies combine to produce one giant, useless force

For my sins—in 1991—I spent a year on the University of Queensland Student Union Council. Yes, I was elected, which means I was a volunteer. It ranks up there among the more pointless activities I’ve undertaken. I was 19, that’s my excuse.

Because I’m conscientious, I took it seriously. I turned up to the monthly meetings. I researched the motions to be debated and voted on in advance. I tried to say not-stupid-things when I thought it was worth making a comment. One side benefit: I learnt meeting procedure.

I also had my first encounter with the Omnicause.

Every single student union council meeting had a Palestine motion, sometimes more than one. These were long, detailed, and competently drafted. They routinely dominated more typical student union fare: budgetary allocations to fix the Rec Club roof, say, or complaints about tuition fees. I wondered what the union’s employed secretarial staff thought of typing up and then photocopying pages upon pages of tedious detail about Middle Eastern geopolitics. I remember picking up copies of both minutes and agendas and boggling at the amount of work involved.

There, in miniature—in sleepy meetings in hot rooms where dust particles danced in stray sunbeams as those of us reading law or STEM subjects tried to make sense of it all—was the Omnicause we now see in campuses all over the developed world. My earliest memories of it involve Aboriginal activists describing Australia as a “settler-colonial state” which had been “invaded”—just like Israel. Australia also had no right to exist.

During one meeting, a Palestine-obsessive buttonholed an engineering student known for his commitment to conservation, bending his ear about the Nakba. I misunderstood the exchange, and congratulated my Greens fellow councillor on recruiting a new party member.

“I’m not sure we want her,” he said. “She doesn’t know or care about the environment, just this Israel thing.”

Already, in 1991, the infant Omnicause had learnt to crawl. It was possible to see—albeit dimly—what would happen to genuine conservationists as single-issue lunatics took over their movement and rotted its political party from within. Darren Johnson—whom I’d call a “Green Green”—and his cri de coeur captures the process well:

Terrible haircut I know, but here’s me in the Hull Daily Mail running for the Green Party in 1990. I stood on a platform of male rapists in female prisons, hormone drugs for 10yos and rebranding women as uterus-owners. No, don’t be silly, it was housing, environment & poll tax.

Darren Johnson, recall, was the UK Green Party’s former principal speaker, its first-ever London councillor, twice its London mayoral candidate, and is a former chair of the London Assembly.

The Omnicause: what writer Hadley Freeman calls ‘the fatberg of activism’. This is a genuine flyer, by the way. I admit to suspecting the work of Mole at the Counter, General Boles, Famous Artist Birdy Rose, or Burnside Not Tosh—so I checked.

The Greens in both Australia and the UK have become a vector for much of the worst nonsense: trans and Gaza and chucking orange paint around an art gallery near you have displaced saving the Fluffy Antechinus¹ or improving biodiversity, quite apart from anything else. Trans, in my view, is also part of the Omnicause, albeit a junior partner. Like Palestine, it’s capable of colonising major political movements focussed on something else entirely, as this (justifiably angry) supporter of Scottish independence points out.

Unable to get traction with environmentalism alone, Fossil Free Books added the Omnicause to its roster and thereby drove away the large corporates supporting the UK’s literary and music festivals, making them unviable beyond this year. People forget that FFB tried this on with the Edinburgh Book Festival last year and got nowhere. Conservation alone wasn’t enough, you see.

Worse, having “succeeded” in their aims for 2024, FFB then had a whinge that Baillie Gifford took its bat and ball and went home rather than “dialoguing” with protesters or “divesting” from Israel. “Baillie Gifford and Barclays shat in our trousers” seemed to be the guts of it.

I used to be one of those lawyers who tried to sell arts sponsorships ideas to her firm. Now I understand why the partners and senior associates looked at me like I had two heads. I recall comments along the lines of “just because you write novels doesn’t mean the rest of us have to care.”

Meanwhile, back in Australia, it’s the Greens who have boosted pro-Palestine protests outside parliamentarians’ constituency offices, including PM Tony Albanese’s. The worst of these prompted a rare bipartisan censure motion directed at the minor party.

Mole at the Counter IS responsible for this one

Okay, I hear you ask, if the Omnicause’s supporters are so unpleasant (not to mention unpopular), how have they managed to get so much traction? I don’t believe in monocausal explanations for anything this complicated. Loads of issues are in play: cowardice, ideological/institutional capture, narcissism, piety display, promotion of spurious expertise.

Lorenzo Warby

’s ongoing essay series addresses many of those elements.

However, here are three things I’ve noticed—and in one case, another person has also noticed, but to a much greater extent than me—that help to round out some detail.

Obsessive freaks, represent

The Omnicause’s proponents are networked obsessives, and any institution involved in managing the distribution of public goods is likely to be poor at resisting persistent networks. This is best illustrated by stepping outside the Omnicause for a moment and onto the tarmac at your local airport.

80 per cent of noise complaints at Heathrow in 2022 came from just ten people. In 2023, a single individual made nearly half of all aircraft noise complaints in Australia. He complained 20,716 times. These people are more than mere NIMBYs (despite a strong family resemblance). They’re what my dad used to call BANANAs: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Think of classic obsessive NIMBY behaviour (not just about airports, either, most of it’s about housing or, God forbid, prisons) and apply it to Palestine, then remember that all this “oppressor-oppressed” decolonisation nonsense emerged from the tertiary sector. Universities are full of smart-and-not-so-smart obsessives, and obsession isn’t always a good thing.

We admire the obsessive sportsman, but we don’t admire him if he becomes so obsessed with winning he uses drugs to cheat (Lance Armstrong, represent). Obsessive lovers are notorious for stalking and murder and tend to finish up in gaol. We’re even cautious around the trainspotter or tabletop gamer: we don’t know if there’s something truly weird lurking down there apart from niche interests. 

STEM people and lawyers also get to have healthier obsessions, both inside the academy and outside it. If you’re very smart and focussed, you can win an entire constitutional case, close a lucrative deal, come up with a cure for cancer, or build a rocket that goes to Mars. Unfortunately, the obsessions available to people in the humanities have less benign spillovers.

When all you’ve got is half-smart wordcels (you don’t need many brains to be good at humanities/social science subjects as they’re currently taught) teeing off against each other over some batshit bit of high Theory, drafting long and tedious pro-Palestine motions on the basis that your JCR/Student Union can change the world is what happens. My point is this: these people will never stop. It’s tempting to give in precisely because they will never stop. They will be in everyone’s institutional face 20,716 times.²

Meanwhile, kids are spraypainting Stonehenge and Taylor Swift’s plane (or what they think is Taylor Swift’s plane) orange for the cause. Obsessiveness is often encouraged in bright young people and it shouldn’t be. Like all traits that are positive in small quantities, it can curdle. When it does, people grow up to be card-carrying members of the Vetocracy.

Back in the USSR

Retired paratrooper and intelligence analyst

Andrew Fox

is responsible for noticing my next under-discussed but salient factor. Very simply, Hamas has well established and effective propaganda strategies with deep roots in historic Soviet campaigns. Even use of the name “Palestine” in the context of a proto-state goes back to the Cold War.

This has had extraordinarily deleterious consequences in an information warfare context:

The information battle went the same way as every other information engagement in this conflict. Hamas got their message out first and international media ran, unquestioningly, with that version of events. Initially it was funny: “How dare they kill us whilst rescuing the hostages we took?” And yet, as ever, international media took the bait and ran Hamas’ story with a straight face.

This time should have been different.

This time, Hamas’ claims were so demonstrably false that it should have been the moment international news media sat up and took notice of the extent to which they have been duped on a weekly basis since 7th October. Hamas were claiming 200 dead before even the last IDF helicopter was wheels up from the mission. Any credible war correspondent should have known that this level of body counting is impossible in such a short time. Yet seemingly, they did not.

The videos of injured Gazans in a hospital were clearly rushed by the Hamas PR teams: one “injured” boy’s head wound is plainly hastily-applied make up. In another video, an “injured” man lifts his head from a pool of “blood”, grins, and rolls away to drier ground. In a third video, a woman’s IV line sits quite obviously on her knuckle and not in a vein in her hand. Crass and patently fake, even by Pallywood’s standards. Any credible war journalist, or an analyst with the slightest medical knowledge, should have spotted this immediately. Yet seemingly, they did not.

Images and video from the scene of the alleged massacre also do not match Hamas’ story. If, as they allege, 200 people were killed and 400 wounded, one would expect the scene of the massacre to still show the signs of war the next day. It does not. Not a blood stain, not a scar of war of any magnitude: an ordinary street in Gaza with life carrying on as normal. Any decent journalist should know that the immediate aftermath of massacre sites comes with evidence of the massacre that took place there. Yet seemingly, they did not.

Soviet thinking—as much as “decolonisation” rhetoric—is also behind the various justifications offered up for armed resistance and its “necessity”.

“Come over to the Dark Side”

My final underappreciated factor concerns the Omnicause’s ability to recruit people who have been monstered by the Jewish lobby.

As most people who read this substack know, I had a lengthy and unpleasant fight with Australia’s Jewish lobby over my first novel. I’d been raised to ignore people who make nuisances of themselves so was completely unprepared for attempts to stop me being admitted, pressure on editors to stop commissioning writing from me, the scuppering of a US edition, and abusive correspondence sent to various employers, including a parliamentarian. The latter issue became so serious it necessitated AFP involvement.

Fixing the admission issue so I could practise unhindered consumed several months of my life and a considerable sum of money. Separately, I was spat on during a long haul flight, events I was slated to attend were picketed, and as recently as 2018, I was no-platformed (by BBC Big Questions). They’d already bought my ticket and paid for my accommodation, too. The admission objection occurred in 2012. The last piece of abusive correspondence sent to my parliamentarian boss was in 2015.

My first novel was published in 1994, and won most of its awards in 1995.

When I originally planned this piece, I discussed with my solicitor (from 2012) the wisdom of scanning in the complaint directed at me and just letting readers see how these things look to those of us on the receiving end. However, she thought a more recent case study was necessary. Mine is also a bit niche because it mostly involves Australia.

Days after forming the view that I’d need to contact someone like Irish writer Kevin Myers for more detail on his run-in with the Jewish lobby—one which culminated in major defamation litigation where Myers was victorious—barrister

Sarah Phillimore

disclosed that she’d been on the receiving end of a complaint from one organisation within the UK’s Jewish lobby (an outfit called “UK Lawyers for Israel”). Helpfully, she’s scanned the entire complaint into Substack, and it’s detailed and recent: her professional regulator, the Bar Standards Board, only dismissed it last week.

It’s also more serious than the 2012 complaint directed at me, because it alleges that her tweets reach the criminal threshold:

I posted the complaint on X, along with my outrage. I contacted UK Lawyers for Israel to make a Data Subject Access Request. I am particularly keen to know exactly to which police force they reported me—because surely such serious allegations of criminal misconduct wouldn’t just be cynically used to bolster  a vexatious complaint? If they had reported me to the police, I need to know which force so I can investigate if a Non Crime Hate Incident has been recorded against me and take further action.

If they haven’t reported me to the police then I am entitled to raise serious concerns about an outfit which will rely on my alleged criminality to gussy up a complaint, and yet fails to make it to the proper agency. I would also be very interested to know who provided them with screenshots from five years ago, but suspect I already do.

The response from quite a few people on social media to my post was interesting. Some people who I had known for years, whose houses I had visited, and who never gave me any indication they found me a repulsive bigot, publicly declared they would cut all ties with me for my repellent views. Others declared themselves variously ‘sad’, ‘stunned’ and ‘speechless’ and told me I was instantly ‘unfollowed’.  Not a single one of the sad or stunned ones shared any of my concerns that spurious allegations had been made by a group of lawyers that I was in breach of the Terrorism Act.

It’s important to be aware that Phillimore—along with retired copper Harry Miller—is the co-founder of We Are Fair Cop, an organisation that (among other things) has won major court victories against both the police and the wider trans lobby, all in defence of freedom of speech. Phillimore is furious, and she is right to be.

Of course, the Palestine situation is front and centre at the moment for obvious reasons, and as you would expect, it has led to absurdities. Labour disendorsed its candidate for Chingford and Wood Green, Faiza Shaheen, for liking a tweet. Note the similarity here with transactivists, also notorious for policing people’s “likes”—especially if their names happen to be J. K. Rowling or Rosie Duffield.

In one of those bizarre six-degrees-of-separation things, the tweet Shaheen liked (chiefly because it contained an amusing Jon Stewart clip) was from a right-leaning French academic who would probably struggle to agree with Shaheen (or Sir Keir Starmer for that matter) on anything. I (slightly) know the Frenchman who wrote the tweet (Philippe Lemoine), and we’ve been mutual followers for years.

On the upside—and partly in response to this incident—Elon Musk has removed the ability to police other people’s TwitterX “likes” by making them all private. You’ll know which tweets you’ve liked, and you’ll be able to see who’s liked yours—but you can no longer see who’s liked anyone else’s. Musk has poo-footed himself quite a few times since buying Twitter, but that is a positive change.

This kind of lobbying is enormously destructive, astonishingly petty, and of long standing. Bari Weiss cut her teeth trying to get pro-Palestine academics sacked, only to have the same shitty behaviour sent her way while she was at the New York Times. It’s also not just directed at people over the Palestine issue (neither I nor Kevin Myers mentioned Palestine, for example). In my view,

Lorenzo Warby

of this parish provides the best account of the behaviour and why it’s so wrong-headed.

What’s also not well known is the Omnicause’s response. Lorenzo doesn’t cover that, but I can.

In my case, there was a deliberate play for my affections from the Palestinian lobby.

I was sent, over a period of months, the entirety of Edward Said’s oeuvre, along with a variety of invitations to art exhibits and academic presentations, typically coupled with accounts of pro-Palestinian individuals (often academics) with similar stories to mine. Typical travails included formal complaints to professional associations—as was done to me—along with direct approaches to employers to try to get the employee in question sacked. The books were all hardbacks—expensive folio editions, I think—with stitched binding and silk bookmarks.

I am the sort of person who—when sent free books—tends to read them. This may explain why I review so many. So I read Professor Said, forming the view that here was another individual who objected to the way he and his were portrayed. This (as should be obvious) is an argument I reject, regardless of who makes it. You don’t tell writers how to depict you and yours. Not even the chief censor gets to try that fascist boot on. I was not recruited to their cause.

Then there was my experience as Canberra’s resident listening post. The number of people who decided I needed to hear about their run-in with the Jewish lobby was notable. Staffers. Politicians from all parties. Journalists. In one case, I became aware of a serious incident at The Australian before the person on the receiving end made it public.

I learnt about demands to sack chiefs-of-staff and senior advisers (separately from what was being done to me, btw—that’s a given). Demands to edit or re-write commentary. Demands for rights of reply far above and beyond what even major public figures get extended to them. Threats of litigation. And endless, vicious, malicious abuse.

People respond to this behaviour in various ways, and I’ve now been forced to accept that my response (“not on your team, but always fair”) was atypical. Some people simply shut up about anything to do with the Middle East—wheesht as Scots call it—treating the entire issue as out-of-bounds. Others fold, and never criticise Jews or Israel again. Some, however, go over to the Other Side.

I have always found the latter response baffling, because being pro-Palestine at present—entirely separate from Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, I’m talking about what’s going on outside the Middle East here—means making common cause with the worst sort of censoriousness and professional victimhood.

A desire to shitcan people for the things they say is coupled with intimidating behaviour at pro-Palestine protests: throwing projectiles at police, vandalising public property and MPs’ constituency offices, and a willingness to use violence against counter-protestors. “Free Palestine” is basically the geopolitical equivalent of DEI. And that’s before we get to the trans lunacy and “Queers for Palestine”.

I struggle to understand people who defect from one mob of censors to another mob of censors. All I can say by way of observation is that it appears to be relatively common.

Incredibly, I’ve even seen Jews defy the whip in this way, and people are no doubt familiar with the phenomenon of Jews who support the likes of Jeremy Corbyn or who turn up to anti-Israel demonstrations, albeit in small numbers. Sometimes, it’s possible to watch this process unfold in real time.

If you’re Australian and interested in politics—and especially the Israel-Palestine issue—then you’ll probably have encountered journalist Antony Loewenstein. If you’ve read any of his recent stuff, you’d know he’s a “pro-Palestine” Jew, up to and including writing multiple books on the subject. However, if you go back to the first piece he wrote on the issue—in 2004—what you encounter is a bright young Jewish man who is really bloody annoyed at what (these days) we’d call “cancel culture”. His descriptions of what went on when a prominent Palestinian visited Australia to receive a prize tally with what I experienced, and what various staffers, politicians, and journalists described to me later.³

A screenshot from the Loewenstein piece on Internet Archive, quoting then-NSW Premier Bob Carr. It’s fair to say the piece also documents a change in Carr’s views—from a pro-Israel position towards a pro-Palestine position

Because I really dislike this kind of behaviour, and because I’m so very disagreeable (in the HEXACO/Big Five sense), my personal irritation and grumpiness extends to all partisans in this conflict. As I’ve explained previously, I found myself unable to sign the October Declaration despite agreeing with it. I just cannot get on board with this kind of activism, and it makes me wonder about the justice of the cause on behalf of which people do it. To be quite frank, I think going to an employer to get someone sacked or disbarred for wrongthink should be a civil wrong and perhaps even a crime.

Activists of all stripes hate being told that their behaviour is counter-productive and puts people off, but the evidence for it is overwhelming. Yes, it takes time for the effect to filter through—people don’t make decisions in five minutes—but eventually, badly behaved activists make the group they purport to represent hated.

You say you want a revolution…

There’s a reason why so many homosexuals are fighting tooth-and-nail against what

Gareth Roberts

calls “genderism”. When the angry backlash comes, we hope to be able to say “not all gays”. As many gays and lesbians support genderism as oppose it. I pointed out in my piece on Gay Shame how it’s impossible not to notice the extent to which fights over trans often involve two opposed teams of homosexuals.

Many gays and lesbians have been—and are—behaving very badly, and making the rest of us look bad by association. We sowed the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind for our irresponsible, authoritarian activism.

Andrew Doyle

—in a recent piece—suggests “it is clearly the case that a majority have not realised the extent to which the [Pride] flag has been hijacked for a cause that actively works against their interests.”

Fortunately, there’s not a “both sides” issue here. The genderists are the bad eggs: authoritarian, censorious, violent. The likes of Sex Matters and the LGB Alliance are conspicuously well-behaved. This matters. In the US, where the madness started and is furthest progressed, support for same-sex marriage is ebbing away. It now stands at 51 per cent, down from 59 per cent. The drop in support since 2021 has been smaller than the pre-2021 rise, but it’s occurred at a much faster rate.

One pernicious effect of Marxism (and this is Marxism, you can’t blame Wokies for it) in higher education is the widespread folk belief that political violence and violent revolution (in addition to public stroppiness & general bad behaviour) work either to attain civil rights or to produce good governance. There are instances where revolutions have probably led to better societies and civilisations on net (USA, France), but given we don’t have access to what happened on alternative timelines, it’s difficult to be certain.

Most of the time, revolutions are terrible, genocidal, disasters. Even in the two success stories, France kept falling to pieces and re-founding various Republics over a period of centuries, while it’s fair to say the US is both currently in a tight spot and nearly blew itself up historically (1860-64) due to unresolved issues left over from its Revolution. In both countries, oceans of post-revolutionary blood were shed.

Political violence with a view to attaining civil liberties does not work in liberal democracies, however, often stymieing the cause. A well-documented instance of the latter is the historic Suffragette movement in the UK. Americans, meanwhile, are invited to note the difference in their country’s public perceptions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

If you’re an electoral systems nerd—as many Australians are, thanks to our fantastically complicated and also compulsory voting arrangements—then one thing you soon notice is how slow the UK was in enacting woman suffrage (1918 for over 30s, then 1928 for under 30s) compared to much of the British Commonwealth (sometimes female suffrage was introduced in the late 19th century and, in Australia’s case, in 1901, at Federation). And remember, this period is when Commonwealth countries really did follow the UK quite closely on political and military policy. It was still “the Empire and Commonwealth Games” back then.

The difference, one learns, is that woman suffrage movements outside the UK were completely peaceful, and made their civil liberties claims in much the same way that the UK’s abolitionists did in the late 18th and early 19th century. In the UK itself, by contrast, the British state pushed the violent Suffragettes away—women willing to invent and then post off letterbox bombs followed by burning down Portsmouth Harbour were not to be negotiated with, but imprisoned. Fortunately, this meant a split in the feminist movement, and eventual political victory for Millicent Fawcett’s non-violent Suffragists.

The lesson? Learn to fight freedom’s cause in freedom’s way, ladies, even when your cause is just.

Two substantive points

You’ll have noticed I’ve avoided discussing any substantive matters, focussing instead on irresponsible activism, military propaganda, and bad behaviour. However, I am going to address two “Israel-Palestine/Jewish lobby” issues here, one in the UK Lawyers for Israel complaint directed against Sarah Phillimore and one that follows on naturally from it. I’m not addressing any others because this issue is a tar pit.

You will note that many of the objections to Phillimore’s tweeting in the complaint against her turn on “Israel’s right to exist”. Most Jews I have met think arguing that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist is anti-Semitic.

The first time I heard that a country didn’t have a right to exist was at some point in the 1990s and concerned Australia, the land of my birth. I have written elsewhere about the pervasiveness of this claim, and the extent to which it scuppered the YES campaign in last October’s Referendum (it went hand-in-hand with renaming Australia Day “Invasion Day”, something activists have been doing since the 90s). The claim emerged from the seriously intellectually underpowered “decolonisation” movement and has only properly been called to account (by the likes of Nigel Biggar, Doug Stokes, and Tom Holland) for its stupidity quite recently.

Unfortunately, its very simplicity is attractive and has been allowed to run wild in higher education throughout the developed world over a period of decades. I commissioned a close reading of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth from Lorenzo (which you should absolutely read) and I think he’s still annoyed with me.

My view of the “nation with no right to exist” claim (which really is all over the British Commonwealth and appears to be infecting the USA via Canada, a reversal of the usual “America sneezes, Canada catches a cold” pattern) is that either everyone gets to make it or no-one does. It isn’t special to Jews or Australians. I’m consistent on freedom of speech, which means I lean towards “everyone gets to argue that any country shouldn’t exist, and everyone else gets to disagree/laugh at them for being dingbats”.

However, if national legislatures decide the claim is so poisonous it ought not be made—and it is pretty poisonous, not just in Israel; Australia’s race relations were badly damaged during last year’s referendum campaign—then any prohibition needs to apply equally to Canada, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Indonesia etc as well as Israel.⁴

After freedom of speech, the rule of law—treat like cases alike—is basically my jam.

DEI is not your friend

In the wake of the October 7 massacre, British political scientist Ben Cobley observed that “Jewish liberals/leftists go out of their way to be consistent and show solidarity with other groups: notably asylum seekers. However this is rarely reciprocated and arguably works against their interests in certain cases.”

I’ll be blunter than Cobley. I’ve spent a fair bit of my life watching Jews make common cause with DEI, affirmative action, and decolonisation while showing no awareness that these ideologies want them dead (or, if alive, at the bottom of the heap).

Konstantin Kisin

—during an event hosted by Australia’s Centre for Independent Studies—sets out the argument with admirable pithiness:⁵

The reason for left-wing anti-Semitism—which is, I think, what we’re probably talking about, outside the more religious-driven element of this—is very simple.

Once you say that there are some groups that are underrepresented, and there are some groups that are overrepresented—and that the only reason or possible explanation for why a group might be overrepresented or underrepresented is privilege and power—then you immediately get to what Adolf called “the Jewish Question”.

Because, as it happens, Jews—for cultural and historical reasons, and because of what they teach their children—on average, are much more likely to be overrepresented in certain industries, in the media, in banking. It’s a fact. They are overrepresented in the same way that many middlemen minorities⁶ will tend to be overrepresented in success and money and so on in different countries.

Armenians were overrepresented in the Ottoman Empire and were persecuted as a result. Foreign-born Chinese are overrepresented all over Asia and are persecuted as a result. East Asians were overrepresented in Africa and were prosecuted and persecuted by people like Idi Amin.

Once you create this ideology, it will inevitably home in on minorities that are successful. Jews are bearing the brunt of that.

During my nineties novel controversy, I encountered a small cottage industry of “Holocaust and Genocide Studies” departments at Australian universities. Did they not get this? Or were they crippled by “do not compare”, so did not consider any Malaysian or Ugandan or Rwandan history? Or examine Cambodia’s slaughter of its intellectuals? Or the USSR’s genocide of its most able farmers, especially in Ukraine?

This tendency to make common cause with the loopy progressive left has meant—since October 7—American Jews especially have tried to take shelter under loopy leftist nostrums: safetyism, compaints about “hate speech”, censorship, cancellations:

So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.

George Packer’s article in The Atlantic, from which the above quotation is taken, reads like a counsel of despair. His concluding comment is worth quoting in full:

“Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

Charity begins at Home

The desire to “care about people in foreign parts” has roots in a mixture of Stoicism, Christianity, and classical liberalism. In its modern form, it comes from Adam Smith, in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Because I’m about to make an argument many people find discomforting, I’ll quote the entirety of Smith’s famous passage here:

Let us suppose that the great Empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment.

He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened.

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. 

To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference?

When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others?

It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.

The combination of obsessiveness with an excess of concern for people outside one’s own city or country is not an unalloyed good. That does not mean it is no good, for the reasons Smith outlines. Thinking that one should never turn one’s mind to foreigners or people outside one’s personal circumstances is, as Smith says, morally monstrous. However, a desire to emulate the Good Samaritan can go too far. Like obsessiveness, it can curdle. “I love humanity, it’s people I can’t stand” may slide into what Sir Roger Scruton called oikophobia: hatred of one’s home.

It’s also long been the case that activism and the charitable/foreign aid sector attracts the sort of personalities who, in other historical periods, could be seriously destructive. I’m talking interfering moral busybodies at the milder end—think the classic “church lady”—to missionaries and colonial governors/local sheiks somewhere in the middle, to conquistadores and janissaries at various extremes. This impulse must be managed. It’s still destructive. See Amnesty International in Haiti. See Mermaids at home.

I’m not counselling a reversion to Neville Chamberlain’s claim that conflicts outside the UK or EU should be ignored tout court because they concern a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

I am, however, arguing for better shot selection. NATO, the EU and UK are rightly and properly interested in defending Ukraine because it is part of Europe and its people have repeatedly attempted to reconfigure their country so it becomes a liberal democracy and not an autocracy. Meanwhile, defending Israel is in the US’s interests because the two countries are long-standing allies and Israel is a prosperous democracy surrounded by incompetently governed autocracies and Godbothering lunatics.

Memo to the Palestine obsessives: charity begins at home. Set your own country and life in order before do-gooding overseas like some hare-brained, Bible-bashing missionary high on his own supply.

Neither Ukraine nor Israel are anything like the various bonkers, inbred shitholes dumb Yanks have attempted to nation-build in the recent past. Chamberlain’s nasty quip, I’m afraid, is almost certainly true of Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, those two enormous cockups have called other, far more arguable interventions into question.

Finally, the activist’s desire to do good, to go in aid, to fix the world: these things represent monotheistic religious virtues running wild, another thing worth avoiding. Attention is good, obsession is freaky. Concern for and interest in the rest of the planet is good, hating your own country as well is not. Some things are good in small quantities but terrible—either useless or actively harmful—when pervasive.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. 

But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

The implication here is that some people are not worth your pity and some truths are not worth your time. That’s a pair of hard life lessons. None of the batshittery I’ve written about above helps either Palestinians or Israelis. They’re still dying, and in numbers—even allowing for Hamas exaggerations and unrescued hostages.

Years ago, Australian satirist Tim Blair described what he called “the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.” I no longer remember the original context—and in any case his line has taken on a life of its own since he coined it—but it’s true now. We’re witness to entire enormous social movements involving many people and vast sums of money that achieve … nothing.

The Fluffy Antechinus does not exist, although the Antechinus does. It’s a marsupial shrew native to Australia.

1. This animal does not exist, although the Antechinus does.

2. This is why you say no. Saying yes avails you nothing except lost ground.

3. It’s well worth signing up for a free Internet Archive account to read both Loewenstein’s piece and commentator Margo Kingston’s brief introduction to it. Kingston edited the book in which it appears, and had never written about the issue previously herself. She, too, got the treatment, as she explains.

4. If you’re interested in where denying entire countries should exist can lead more widely than just the Israel-Palestine issue, then it’s worth reading up on Konfrontasi, which many Australians learn in O-Level/Junior history.

5. The entire interview is available on the Centre for Independent Studies website, and is well worth watching.

6. I prefer the term “market-dominant minorities” to “middlemen minorities”, as it captures rural groups like Kulaks who were also economically successful. While most market-dominant minorities are associated with urban environments, Kulaks were an exception to this pattern. They dominated because they were skilled farmers, not because they ran markets.