http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/muslims-trump-all-other-minorities-because-of-the-victim-value-index/

February 27, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield 8 Comments

James Kirchick has written an extensive piece on the Victimhood Olympics replete with examples and references. He notes that…

Trans beats gay and Muslim beats black. As someone who writes frequently on the topic of homosexuality, I have learned the hard way what happens to those who challenge the orthodoxy of transgender activists…
This is because in the progressive imagination, the perceived plight of Muslims now trumps the sufferings of all other groups. It is this conceit that goes the furthest in explaining President Obama’s remark to Vox earlier this month that the murder of four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris last month was “random,”…

But he fails to explain what the basis for this hierarchy is. Why do Muslims trump Jews and why do trannies trump gay men?

There is a clear Victim Value Index. It’s not random. It has a definitive basis. That basis is the value of a victim identity to the left.

The first thing to understand is the dirty little secret of the Victim Value Index. While loud vocal assertions of suffering are very important, the substance of such suffering is unimportant when moving up the ladder of the Victim Value Index…
Actual suffering doesn’t matter. Neither does historical justice. Both of those are easy to make up, and in a dogma-ridden environment no one will look past the politically correct line anyway.
The Victim Value Index is calculated based on one overriding factor: Disruptiveness. Those who are most disruptive go to the head of the line.

This is the most obvious thing that people have noted about the Social Justice Warrior twitter mobs. They’re angry. They’re disruptive. This is also their virtue.

SJW code assumes that the angrier you are, the more oppressed you are. (Unless you’re a straight white male who isn’t pretending to be a woman and isn’t angry on behalf of an oppressed minority group.) But your anger is only useful if it serves the left.

The angriest groups, the ones with the newest rawest edge make the cut. A propensity for violence helps. Ergo, Muslims win.

Progressivism is a revolution in slow motion, and revolutions need revolutionaries. Disruption is more than just grievance, it’s violence. Those who are willing to ruthlessly attack the status quo clearing the ground for revolution are the ones who go to the head of the line and the dais of honor on top. A little murder and mayhem, and progressives will trot out “moderate” versions of the murderers and mayhemists, usually linked to them, and offer to represent them and tamp down the violence in exchange for meeting their demands.

September 11 and its aftermath is why Muslims have gone to the top of the Victim Value Index. The left may swear up and down that they are interested in Muslim civil rights, but if the Muslims were Sikhs, they would merit a place somewhere in the back. Before Muslims began prominently blowing things up in the United States, the left barely paid any attention to them. Once they did, they began outweighing every other group in the country because killing 3,000 people is the gold standard of revolutionary mayhem.

The Victim Value Index places the most disruptive groups at the front, the somewhat disruptive groups in the middle and the least disruptive groups at the back. The status of groups within the Index can change with their behavior. Muslims used to be shelved in the back with Asians, Indians and Jews. The War on Terror dramatically upgraded their status. The other groups are stuck there because they are relatively successful and aren’t rioting or blowing things up.

Latinos are still somewhere in the middle. Native Americans are in the back along with most unclassified minorities. Homosexuals are somewhere near the front, but behind African-Americans. Their status tends to drift wildly depending on current events, but they cannot overtake African-Americans or fall behind Latinos. Not unless some drastic events take place that change their status. Women are, and have always been, in the back.

The hierarchy can and does change. If Muslim violence were to suddenly disappear, the left’s interest in them in the US would go away. That’s a simple fact. The left values violent groups over non-violent ones. In the social media era, that can be virtual violence, cyberbullying and social media mobs. All that counts as activism and the left is keen to recruit activists for its cause.

Filed Under: The Point

About Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.