Like gay men, Jews have been relegated to the bottom of the progressive victim pyramid, a low ranking that has held fast in spite of the rampant bigotry and violent attacks directed at them. Last week, blogger and graduate student Frederik de Boer provided a ripe demonstration of how Muslim—always, whatever the circumstances—beats Jew. Commenting on an article in The Atlantic about the recent spate of anti-Semitic terrorist attacks in Europe, de Boer mocked the author for “spend[ing] the requisite amount of time showing Grave Concern about the increasing threat to Europe’s increasingly threatened Jews, who are threatened, at an increasing level.” The threat to Jews is less important to de Boer, as a properly credentialed progressive, than is refuting what he crudely characterizes as the “Muslim-throngs-are-advancing-across-Europe” meme. This, just weeks after the massacre at the Hyper Cacher market in Paris, and a mere two days after an Islamist killed a volunteer Jewish security officer standing watch outside a synagogue in Copenhagen (whose leaders were denied additional security by the Danish government).

For an example of how the tenet “Muslim beats black” works, merely reflect upon its apogee: ex-Muslim feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author who underwent a clitoridectomy as a young girl and fled to the Netherlands after her family arranged her marriage to a distant cousin. There, Hirsi Ali rose to become an outspoken activist for the rights of women, an author, and a parliamentarian. After the artist Theo van Gogh, with whom Hirsi Ali was collaborating on a film about the subjugation of women under Islam, was murdered in broad daylight in the streets of Amsterdam, a death threat for Hirsi Ali impaled to his chest, she was placed under 24-seven police protection.

Now, had Hirsi Ali left any other religious order or conservative movement—say, Mormonism or the Republican Party—she would have been feted with international literary prizes, instantly awarded a New York Times column, and welcomed with open arms by progressive campus organizations. Instead, Hirsi Ali was ultimately exiled from Holland, obtained a sinecure at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and was disinvited from addressing the commencement ceremonies at Brandeis University. Meanwhile, liberal intellectual paragons like Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma trash Hirsi Ali as, in Ash’s words, an “Enlightenment fundamentalist” in the pages of the New York Review of Books.