Friday, December 09, 2011

"Contempt is the snobbery of the cognitive elite"

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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.")

James Taranto

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See this:-

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.' " 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.

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1 comment:

Juniper in the Desert said...

The oik is destined to walk, blinded by his inflated ego, straight into the bonfire of the vanities!!