We can't recall if it was somebody from CAP or MediaMutters who said: "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East--the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."It was just last year that Taranto intoduced us to Oikophobia--which even then had other obvious applications:
Oh wait, that was Pat Buchanan in 1990. That year he also observed: "If it comes to war, it will not be the 'civilized world' humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown."
So how is it that two decades later Buchanan's themes--widely and not unreasonably described as anti-Semitic at the time--are being picked up by American lefties with names like Rosenberg, Duss and Alterman? Left-wing antipathy to Israel is not especially new. The academic left in particular has long glorified "Third World" political movements, including Arab ones.
Jewish left-wing antipathy toward Israel poses a bit of a puzzle, but not a mystery. Guys like these are sometimes described as "self-hating Jews," but you understand everything if you realize that is a misnomer. They don't hate themselves at all. They have an inflated self-regard that leads them to disdain fellow Jews. It's simply the Jewish variant of oikophobia. (Perhaps someone will think to coin the portmanteau "joikophobia.") [emphasis added]
The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' "When I blogged about this at the time (Those Aren't Self-Hating Jews--They're Oiks!), I wrote:
What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.
Scruton was writing in 2004, and his focus was on Britain and Europe, not America. But his warning about the danger of oikophobes--whom he amusingly dubs "oiks"--is very pertinent on this side of the Atlantic today, and it illuminates how what are sometimes dismissed as mere matters of "culture" tie in with economic and social policy:
The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence's question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community.
The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it. The explosive effect of this has already been felt in Holland and France. It will be felt soon everywhere, and the result may not be what the oiks expect. [emphasis added]
Doesn't this sound like it also applies to those Israelis, both in the media and in NGOs, who have repudiated every option Israel has taken in order to defend itself against the rockets fired out of Gaza by terrorists of Hamas. Instead they suddenly become experts in international law claiming that any step taken to defend Israel's sovereignty or guarantee its security is illegal.Of course, this would apply outside of Israel, to any number of Jewish pundits who seek to lecture Israel on what it needs to do.
Back then, James Taranto left a short comment to my post:
Jewish oiks would be "joiks."Sounds about right.
Technorati Tag: Israel and Joikophobia and Oikophobia.
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