There are many ways to measure whether politicians are guided by principle or politics. One is to compare what provokes their outrage and what does not.

In April 2024, a Jewish student at UCLA tried to walk across his own campus.

Pro-Palestinian protesters physically blocked his path and decided, on their own authority, who could and could not pass. UCLA security officers stood by and did nothing. A federal judge later ruled that UCLA could not permit Jewish students to be excluded from parts of campus because of their identity or beliefs, calling such exclusion “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”

Where were California’s Democratic members of Congress about the incident? Other “progressive” members of Congress? Where were the press conferences, the demands for investigations and the flood of social media condemnations?

Their silence was striking.

Then came Rep. Ro Khanna’s recent 7,500-mile trip to the West Bank in July 2026.

Khanna claimed that armed settlers and Israeli soldiers prevented his delegation from proceeding and that U.S. Embassy involvement helped resolve the situation. Israeli officials, the U.S. embassy, and various parties dispute key parts of that account, saying the delegation entered a restricted security area without proper coordination and denying Khanna’s characterization of the encounter.

Yet progressive members of Congress like Ilhan Omar quickly rallied behind Khanna, condemning Israel and amplifying his account around the world.

The comparison is not between two people who were blocked. It is between two very different reasons for being blocked and the reactions that followed.

At UCLA, private protesters established their own checkpoint and allegedly decided which Americans could pass based on who they were or what they believed. A federal court concluded that a public university could not allow that to happen.

In the West Bank, the issue was about security. The area was subject to access restrictions because it was an active conflict zone. The dispute is over whether those security measures were properly applied not whether Ro Khanna had a right to unrestricted entry.

One concerns equal treatment under American law, the other concerns the exercise of security authority in a foreign conflict zone. Yet the louder political outrage came in response to the latter.

If elected officials cannot summon the same moral urgency when a Jewish American student is excluded from his own campus as they do when a colleague encounters a disputed security checkpoint overseas, the question is no longer whether they oppose injustice. It is what kinds of injustice – and for whom – they choose to notice.

We are witnessing more and more of the elected progressive wing marking American and Israeli Jews as “absolutely vile” people unworthy of basic protections and rights who “must be stopped.”