Edmund Connelly’s "Goyland"

Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article “Goyland: Where the Wild Things Are” gets at an important aspect of Jewish psychology — the bunker mentality of imminent threat. The next Holocaust is always just around the corner. They see their own history in the West as one long vale of tears, beginning with the Romans sacking Jerusalem and destroying the temple, then suffering at the hands of Christian fanatics in the Middle Ages, then being accused of acting as a state within a state in emerging European nations, then the evil Czar, and then Hitler. (A good recent example of this mindset is Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals?) As Connelly notes, Jewish life in the Middle Ages was far better than the great majority of people, and this has generally been true throughout Jewish history. And they never consider the possibility that their own behavior has anything to do with whatever bad things happen to them.

Psychologically, these traits show that Jews are on the extreme high end of ethnocentrism — what I have termed Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism. We all have this trait, but there are individual differences in ethnocentrism, and Jews are at the extreme high end. Ethnocentric people see the world in terms of ingroups (morally upright, possessed of positive traits; always the innocent victim, never the perpetrator) and outgroups (evil, merciless, sub-human, always the aggressor). Every affront to the group is exaggerated. There is a sense of imminent danger from the evil outgroup. In the words of a Jewish writer, “Wherever we look, we see nothing but impending Jewish destruction. ”

This hyper-ethnocentrism is the most important aspect of Jewish psychology, leading them to be aggressive against their perceived enemies. As discussed in the above-referrenced article, in their minds, any criticism of Jews becomes a warrant for genocide. “Criticism of Jews indicates dislike of Jews; this leads to hostility toward Jews, which leads to Hitler and eventually to mass murder. Therefore all criticism of Jews must be suppressed. With this sort of logic, it is easy to dismiss arguments about Palestinian rights on the West Bank and Gaza because ‘the survival of Israel  is at stake.'”   Any sort of exclusionary thinking [such as opposing immigration of non-Whites] leads inexorably to a Holocaust. Recently several New York State legislators favoring same-sex marriage argued on the basis of their relatives being murdered in the Holocaust.

This hyper-ethnocentrism is a large part of why Jews are such formidable opponents. And it also implies that rational arguments are not going to be effective in swaying Jewish opinion. From their point of view, it’s a matter of survival.