An unnamed fallacy is deranging geopolitical discourse. Not only is it a mechanism by which ordinary people obtain a grossly distorted picture of Israel, but it drives processes by which people have traditionally obtained a grossly distorted picture of Jews. More broadly, it saps the legitimacy of Western democracies and sows confusion. This essay will define and name the fallacy, before arguing that we must reject the premise on which it is founded.
It is often maintained that we should hold Israel to higher standards because it is a democracy, or because it forms part of the West in some respects. This implies that Western democracies are morally superior, as otherwise the higher standards of conduct would be arbitrary or perverse. Or to put it another way, the differential standard[1] would be a double standard and thus unfair by definition.
A corollary of the differential standard is that Israel will be criticised more readily than its (non-democratic, non-Western) enemies. As such, it is justifiable only on the condition that people do not conclude that Israel is worse than those countries which one holds to lower standards on account of Israel receiving more or harsher criticism.
By way of illustration, consider a family of four comprising two parents and two adolescent sons. The elder lad is a wastrel, abusive and violent, and thoroughly immoral. Through painful experience his parents have come to the conclusion that he is incorrigible. The best thing for everyone’s safety and well-being is to ignore and occasionally placate him. The second son is a typical teenager, sometimes moody and impulsive, but essentially a well-socialised youngster. To guide him on the right path, his parents chide him when he misbehaves. Occasionally they even lose their temper and shout at him, safe in the knowledge that he will not physically assault them.
A new neighbour, unfamiliar with the family situation, might reasonably conclude, based on the amount of angry scolding, that the younger son is the problem child.
This example neatly illustrates the dynamics, I think, and therefore I propose that we call this error in reasoning the problem-child fallacy.
Note that the premise of the argument (certain countries should be held to higher standards) is reasonable, and that the conclusion (the one that is criticised more is the bad one) is also reasonable based on the information available to the person making the inference. The conclusion is of course fallacious, and moreover will almost certainly be false if one properly understands the implications of the premise. All it takes, however, for the conclusion to be heuristically warranted is for the premise to be obscured and the consequence of the premise (additional criticism) to be apparent.
We have seen in our example how this false inference can arise through entirely innocent means, with all parties acting in good faith. The parents did not deliberately hide their reason for criticising their younger son more, and it is genuine ignorance that causes the neighbours to draw the wrong conclusion.
This is what makes the fallacy so insidious. The false conclusion is not drawn from a premise, but from the consequence of a premise. Worse, the premise is largely silent while its consequence is voluble. Even in a world of perfect good faith and pure motives, it would be a treacherous chain of reasoning.
It would seem obvious that if we accept the validity of the premise (that we ought to hold certain countries to higher standards) and consequently criticise such a country more often, or in stronger terms, then we should be at pains to remind our audience, as often as necessary to ward off confusion, of the differential standard we are applying. In other words, we should, if we are acting in good faith, seek to prevent our audience from drawing the wrong conclusion.
Conversely, we would be acting in bad faith if were to whisper the premise and then vociferously exercise the licence it affords. It would also be intellectually dishonest to hide the premise and only appeal to it when challenged, or as a sort of afterthought to provide cover for selective criticism. This would be to commit the motte-and-bailey fallacy: We heap opprobrium on Israel, and when challenged on why our outrage is so unbalanced, we retreat behind the excuse that we are holding Israel to higher standards.
How does the problem-child fallacy play out? And who does it benefit? To analyse, I will look at the country I know best.
It would be natural for an average consumer of news in Ireland to conclude, based on volume and tone of criticism, that Israel is the most malign nation on the planet. After all, the 6 o’clock news on RTÉ is not prefaced by disclaimers that Israel will be criticised more abundantly than, say, Iran as a matter of principle. Indeed, mainstream Irish news coverage would powerfully suggest to a person of average intelligence and interest in world affairs that Israel so surpasses all other nations in misdeeds as to be uniquely evil.
While feverish belief in the evil of Israel has long been a drain around which hard-left politics swirls, it is not a natural view for liberals or conservatives to hold. What is being surreptitiously fed to the Irish public, through the operation of the problem-child fallacy and numerous other anti-Israel biases, is a diet of hardcore leftwing antizionism.
For the far-left activists and Islamists who wave the Iranian regime flag, or the Hezbollah flag, on the streets of Dublin while calling for global intifada, human rights are merely something to be flung in the face of Western ‘imperialists’. People resisting Western/Zionist ‘imperialism’ are not expected to uphold human rights, or to comport to any universal standards of behaviour at all.
It follows, then, that leftists and Islamists cannot sincerely employ this differential standard, as they do not believe that democracies are morally superior. However, they can profit a great deal from the prolific criticism of Israel it facilitates. Any mechanism of public discourse that amplifies criticism of democracies and dampens criticisms of authoritarian regimes is meat and drink to anyone, left or right, who despises democracies and their liberal values.
On 11 June of this year, MEP[2] Barry Andrews published a letter in the Irish Independent that sets out the differential-standard argument[3]. Andrews is a member of Fianna Fáil and therefore ostensibly a centrist politician, although on the question of Israel his attitudes are hard to distinguish from those of far-left activists. To give just one example, on 31 March 2026 he encouraged the Irish owners of the Stripe financial services platform to flout US sanctions against Francesca Albanese.[4]
The brief letter presents a variant of the differential-standard argument that allows us to complete our analysis. It begins: “Some people ask why there is such a focus on Israel compared with other countries and regimes around the world, many of which are nasty.” The reason, according to Andrews, is that Israel purports to be a democracy and is part of various Western institutions. He concludes: “When a state claiming to be a liberal democracy, so closely aligned with Europe, clearly commits such heinous war crimes, it is our duty to speak up and act. Otherwise, we risk being complicit.”
First we must understand what Andrews means by “heinous war crimes”. In the letter he does not specify what they are, but other public statements allow us to surmise what kind of crimes he has in mind. At the height of the Gaza famine hysteria last year, for example, he wrote that a famine was being “inflicted openly, methodically, intentionally, for all to watch on social media”.[5] On his website, he referred to “record levels of hunger”.[6]
Since then, the famine narrative has utterly collapsed.[7] If not predisposed to believe the worst about Israel, Andrews could have questioned the dubious famine stories instead of watching a curated narrative on social media. (It is strange how often politicians who warn about the dangers of dis-/misinformation[8] think that one can “watch” a famine or a genocide on social media.) The famine story was a triumph of Hamas propaganda and media complicity in falsehood over empirical reality. It is in this light that we must view Andrews’ understanding of “heinous war crimes” committed by Israel – fundamentally, as activist truths as opposed to factual ones.[9]
As I argued above, good-faith use of the differential standard requires scrupulousness, as its distorting effect must be corrected by drawing attention to it. At a minimum, we would expect someone acknowledging the differential standard to be frank about the crimes of Israel’s enemies. Remember that these enemies, none of which are Western democracies, will, outside the generally infrequent moments of acknowledgement, be tacitly held to lower standards than Israel. So the act of acknowledgement is a rare opportunity to mitigate the risk of your audience misunderstanding when you go hard on Israel and soft on its enemies.
How does Andrews handle this opportunity in his letter? He refers to some governments and regimes around the world as being “nasty”. He does not name them or elaborate further or append expressions of moral disgust. By contrast, he refers to “heinous war crimes” committed by Israel and “the extreme nature of the current Israeli government’s crimes”.
The crimes of Hamas are not mentioned, nor those of Hezbollah, nor those of the Iranian regime. They are subsumed in the crimes of the world and packed away into a single word. In the very act of acknowledging the differential standard, Andrews emphasises Israeli malfeasance while waving at the crimes of unnamed others. Instead of correcting the distortion effected by the differential standard, he accentuates it.
A mind that was alert to the misleading power of the differential standard, and particularly its power to demonise, through the force of distortion and repetition, would not have exercised this power so freely in the moment of acknowledgement.
When Andrews writes that Israel is “supposed to be part of the democratic community of nations” and describes it as “a state claiming to be a liberal democracy”, he betrays himself as an unserious commentator. Moreover, we might recognise in his words the gross complacency of a nation at peace condescending to a nation at war.
From its safe position as an island on the western fringes of Europe, sheltered by friendly neighbours and the great umbrella of Pax Americana, and with scarcely a soul on God’s green Earth committed to its eradication, Ireland can afford to deplore the grubby work of war. It can view the attacks on Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran with supreme indifference, and view every casualty caused by Israel in response as murder. It can even depart wholly from reality and accuse Israel of engineering famines and committing genocide[10].
None of this has serious consequences for Ireland, or at least we can go very far in this direction before we feel any. But beyond a point – and this point has long been crossed – it becomes implausible to deny that we are simply an opponent of Israel and a de facto supporter of its enemies.
Andrews finishes his letter by warning of the risk of complicity with Israel’s “heinous war crimes” – which, as we have seen, include bogus famines. This issue of complicity is linked to our ties with Israel, such as they are, primarily through the EU, but the landscape of complicity is much more complex. To the extent that Ireland supports the Iranian regime, for example, we become complicit in its crimes, and that complicity does not cease to hold because Iran is a theocracy. Nor is our complicity in Iran’s crimes morally diminished because we hold Iran to lower standards. Nor is the suffering of Iranians tortured and murdered by the regime any less. We cannot transfer the lower standards from them to us to absolve our complicity.
What does it mean in terms of complicity to have perfunctorily criticised the crimes of the Iranian regime? What does it mean for Ireland to have maintained, and even strengthened, cosy diplomatic ties with Tehran as the regime massacres tens of thousands of innocent protestors[11]? What does it mean for the Irish media to have largely throttled the voices of the protestors and looked away from their plight? What does it mean to have provided succour for Hamas and Hezbollah by downplaying their crimes? What does it mean to have recognised a Palestinian state without making Hamas not being in power a condition? What does that mean for the prospects of a better future for the people of Gaza? What does it mean to have helped generate a grotesque caricature of the world’s only Jewish state at a time when antisemitic attacks are proliferating worldwide? And what does it mean to have propagated, by means of falsehoods, an image of Israel as uniquely evil, one that mirrors the ancient prejudice of Jews being uniquely evil, the pariahs of humankind[12]?
To be clear, I am not blaming Ireland for criticising Israel for its actual deeds, impartially, as we would any other country, but for falsely laying the gravest crimes at Israel’s feet while glossing over the crimes of its enemies.
The differential standard behind the problem-child fallacy is an engine of falsehood, distortion and demonisation through repetition, and one that preferentially targets the world’s only Jewish state in these classically antisemitic ways. In addition, it is an agent of confusion and demoralisation in democratic societies.
One of the examples of antisemitism cited by the IHRA working definition is the application of standards to Israel that one does not apply to any other democratic nation. But the problem is larger than this. If we apply Brobdingnagian standards to a democracy and Lilliputian ones to an autocracy, and create a distortion such that Houyhnhnms are made out to be Yahoos and Yahoos are made out to be Houyhnhnms, then we systematically bend the information landscape against democracy. The problem-child fallacy warps reality in this way.
Consequently, we must reject differential comparison and hold autocracies to the same standards to which we hold democracies[13]. That would be an important step towards correcting our distorted vision.
Endnotes
[1] By “differential standard” I simply mean a situation where two or more groups are held to different standards without this necessarily being unfair – essentially a double standard stripped of its negative denotation.
[2] Member of the European Parliament.
[3] The following X post contains a link to the (paywalled) letter along with an image showing much of the content (the letter contains fewer than 200 words):
[6] https://www.barryandrews.ie/copy-of-housing
[7] https://www.thejc.com/opinion/analysis/how-a-united-nations-study-shatters-the-gaza-starvation-narrative-v0lzthdp
[8] It goes without saying that this includes Barry Andrews. For example:
[9] Lest I be accused of being wise after the event:
https://donalmoloney.substack.com/p/take-your-pick
[10] The genocide claim, which long predated the current conflict, was always deeply cynical. Barry Andrews, as you would expect, participates in this libel. For a thorough debunking, see:
https://www.skeptic.com/article/when-genocide-loses-its-meaning-law-war-gaza/
For my own contributions:
https://donalmoloney.substack.com/p/boundless
and
https://donalmoloney.substack.com/p/the-counterfeiters
Ireland, to its eternal shame, proposed an ad-hoc broadening of the definition of genocide when it joined South Africa’s vexatious ICJ genocide case against Israel.
[11] For example:
See also the letter written by then President Higgins to the President of the Islamic Republic reiterating the condolences of the Irish people for the death of Ebrahim Raisi, the infamous Butcher of Tehran. Higgins argued that the letter was standard diplomatic protocol, but the warmness of his regard for this mass-murderer of regime opponents is all too apparent and makes a mockery of the notion that concern for human rights guides Irish foreign policy:
[12] Israel is frequently called a pariah state in Ireland, which has enacted a boycott law against one country only: https://spectator.com/article/ireland-will-regret-its-planned-israeli-settlements-trade-ban/
[13] For the avoidance of doubt, I mean holding undemocratic regimes to our standards and not vice-versa. I do not think we should take a mild view of a state murdering women for showing their hair, no matter which regime is responsible or what the system of government is.
Míle buíochas as an alt seo (hope that’s approximately right)!
I hadn’t come across the idea of differential standards before but you make the case convincingly that it becomes a double standard in practice.