The Iranian people’s uprising has won the admiration world-wide. All people who are disgusted with brutality exercised in the name of the Creator are spontaneously attracted to the brave young people fighting in the streets of Iran against the heavily-armed storm-troopers of the self-proclaimed Islamic Republic–a caricature of both Islam and Republicanism.
But it has also attracted the warm “sympathy” of warmongers who cheered on the Israeli military machine in its unconscionable wars against Lebanon and Gaza, not to mention lying the American people into a war on Iraq. These people demagogically proclaim their undying support to the Iranian people–even at the cost of undermining their revolution by giving it the kiss of death of appearing to be an American conspiracy.
Among these “friends” of the Iranian people we see Bernard-Henri Levy, founder of the French New Intellectual movement. Levy tried to fill the rather large void left by Sartre. But if Sartre courageously protested the victims of imperialism–particularly French imperialism–in Algeria, Indochina, and so on, Levy has waged war on something he apparently sees as a more urgent threat–European anti-Americanism. Let’s admit that Sartre had his problems–his sick apologetics for Stalin’s and Mao’s crimes comes to mind–but he stood up to the French state’s crimes. Levy has made a project of attacking the West’s enemies’ crimes. Levy has embraced the West’s rich and powerful the way Sartre embraced the workers at a Renault factory. As Doug Ireland observed on his blog,
As someone who lived in France for a decade–where I even once had the unpleasant experience of passing three hours interviewing the arrogant and indigestible egomaniac BHL–I can tell you what most serious intellectuals in France know: that BHL is a fraud and an impostor, just as Cohen’s book charges. As an assiduous flatterer and intimate friend of business barons, showbiz stars, and political leaders, his conduct is a thousand miles from the “intellectual liberty” of which BHL likes to pose as the lyric defender. His only real talent is his manipulation of a media microcosm without intellectual standards and his endless and skillful self-promotion–the lengths to which BHL and his trophy wife (the actress Arielle Dombasle … ) will go to promote themselves and their obscenely luxurious lifestyle as the incarnation of the “glitterati” is a matter of great hilarity in France.
If Sartre was a tragic figure, Levy is a farce.
Nor is this necessarily a terrible thing to provide ballast to keep anti-imperalists from getting carried away in their enthusiasms for their heroes and heroines. But Levy’s methods in this are, as his critics show, dishonest.
An example Americans can appreciate is his tour of the United States at the invitation of the center-right Atlantic Monthly, which gave him a car and a chauffeur. The idea was to follow “In the Footsteps of Tocqueville.” But unlike Tocqueville, his book is filled with meandering musings such as,
Leafed through the first few pages of One Nation, After All, which the author, the sociologist Alan Wolfe, gave me last night. Maybe the secret lies in this “after all.” Maybe American patriotism is more complex, more painful, than it seems at first glance, and perhaps its apparent excessiveness comes from that. Or perhaps it has to do, as Tocqueville saw it, with a kind of “reflective patriotism” that, unlike the “instinctive love” that reigned during the regimes of times past, is forced to exaggerate when it comes to emblems and symbols.
The problem with this kind of journalism is that it is entirely superficial. He starts his tour with a visit to an American prison. It is, he points out, a grim place, but then, the inmates are depicted as savages, and they excite no curiosity in him (unlike politicians, famous authors, or political activists, who positively fascinate him). Just as he has little interest in ordinary people, he has little interest in humdrum facts and figures. As an American observer wrote of this piece,
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a much too refined a visitor to show the United States’ most terrifying illnesses. He visits our prisons, one of the most sensitive issues in our society, but kindly avoids embarrassing us by giving the figure for the country’s prison population. (For the curious, it reached 2,267,787 in 2004 and increases ceaselessly.) …
This curiosity served him well in his career as a journalist. (Also see this review from the American Social-Democratic paper In These Times.)
He petitioned the American Congress on behalf of the Nicaraguan contras in the name of the Free World when it appeared that Congress was going to cut aid to these terrorists.
BHL was a great admirer of Ahmad Shah Masoud, the leader of the northern forces and America’s last best hope in Afghanistan, calling him a “democrat” and “that Muslim of light”. “I campaigned for France to support the great Ahmed Shah Massoud … I went to see him many times. He was my friend. Massoud, to me, was the embodiment of moderate Islam,” he said in an interview. Sent to Afghanistan in February 2002 by the French government, according to one journalist, he returned with a report of no particular use. Embarrassing questions about the ethnic composition of his forces (lots of Tajiks, but no Pashtuns) and his record of brutality when he had the reigns of power (amputations, summary executions, rape, the shelling of civilian neighborhoods) and a strict (and misogynistic) enforcement of sharia law went unasked.
In the wake of the barbaric murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, BHL rushed to get his two cents in on the crime. Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, William Dalrymple, a journalist who had covered Pakistan for seventeen years, compares it with the quiet dignity of Daniel’s widow’s Mariane’s memoir:
Its generosity and its quiet force–she tells how she planned to commit suicide and decided against it–puts it on quite a different level from that of the simple testament of a widow. It is not only a personal victory over an enormous personal tragedy, but a lesson for each and every one of us: one must never abandon the idea of understanding.
The second book on the assassination, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, is more ambitious: he affects to combine investigative journalism and novel writing. But it suffers from prohibitive weaknesses and teems with factual errors of the greatest importance…. Although he calls for the creation of a new literary type, “Romanquête”, mixing reportage and fiction, a la … Truman Capote, it becomes clear from the first pages that when it comes to Pakistan, BHL aimed much too high, considering his abilities. His work, however, raises questions of great importance, even if, for the most part, his is purely fictitious and his political analyses are simplistic and badly researched.
Thus, BHL claims that Omar Sheikh lived on a street … which does not exist. He places Mozaffarabad, Kashmir’s center for jihadi agitation, in India. In exchange, India’s Koranic school, Akora Khattack, is placed in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. Saharanpur is moved a four hour distance to the suburbs of Delhi. The Pakistani moderate Abdul Ghani Lone, who advocated making peace with India, and his political party are described as a Islamic extremist. He asserts he knows Ossam ben Laden’s itinerary through Pakistan after his escape from Tora Bora, a not inconsequential feat, considering that the world’s intelligence services have been racking their brains over this for years. He alleged that Pearl was hot on the trail of proof that Pakistani intelligence was complicit in financing the World Trade Center attack, and this led to his murder; yet there is not a scintilla of evidence to back up this speculation. Pakistanis are referred to as murderous fanatics, the living dead, and so forth. The reviewer concludes by calling BHL’s book an insult to Daniel Pearl’s memory.
BHL visited Algeria and was given the red carpet treatment by the generals there, and lavished, in return, the most treacly praise on the generals’ men he spoke with, according to a review of his writing on the subject. The reviewer, Nicolas Beau, provides a long list of errors and omissions in BHL’s article too tedious to give here. He notes that he was accorded a private interview Algerian military strongman Liamine Zéroual, a rare privilege, rarely if ever accorded European journalists.
BHL’s voyage to Columbia fares little better at the hands of his critics. One writes that the reader
will discover … that San Vicente del Caguan, a demilitarized zone controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is “right in the middle of the Amazonian rain forests” (sure fooling those who, leaving this small town, would cross dozens kilometres of a savannah…).
More sinisterly, he writes of the FARC guerillas,
“These people who are responsible for dozens of thousand deaths, these master blackmailers, this kidnappers, these specialists in ‘dirty war’.” The conflict, according to the most common estimates, left in the order of 40,000 dead these past ten years. During this period, all reports–from that of Justicia y Paz (Bogotá, 1992) to the recent report of the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights–blame about 80% of the victims on police forces and especially the paramilitaries, and 20% on the guerrillas. That is, the guerrillas are to blame for more or less 8000 deaths. This is a lot, but it in no way corresponds to “dozens of thousands”. BHL also repeats the canard about FARC being nothing more than a communist mafia, supporting itself on drugs and kidnapping, a charge the reviewer demolishes. On the other hand, BHL reports without comment a statement by “Carlos Castaño, leader of the paramilitaries and well-known drug trafficker”, that “We are not traffickers.”
The Huffington Post, which has, unfortunately, decided to serve as an outlet for BHL’s writings, carried a report by him on Russia’s invasion of Georgia. He claimed that he was in Gori, a major city in northern Georgia, and that it was burned to ruins. In fact, he was, as members of his entourage admitted, nowhere near Gori and the city, thought deserted (the Russians were surrounding it), was “pretty much intact.” (For more on this see Art Goldhammer‘s wonderful blog on French politics and culture.)
Levy was a supporter of the Lebanon war of 2006, and could be counted on to raise no uncomfortable questions about its prosecution by the Israelis.
Finally, we come to Israel’s war on Gaza. BHL sees Israel as the victim, blaming the Palestinian casualties on a deliberate policy of using civilians as human shields. Or this story, in which he writes of Israeli Arabs who are for some odd reason infuriated over the murder and mayhem going on across the border,
I ask one of them. “Isn’t it the State you are citizens of, with the same name and the same rights as its other citizens?” The boy looks at me as if I were crazy. [Why would that be?] He tells me that Israel is a racist State that treats him as sub-human, forbids him from going to university and to nightclubs, and, as a consequence, that Israel can expect no loyalty from him. On that note he catches up with his friends, leaving me to my perplexity…
Or this quote:
“Nothing justifies the death of a kid,” Asaf, 33 years old, tells me. He is the owner of a restaurant in New York, and in his “reserve” periods, pilot of a Cobra helicopter. “Nothing. And that’s why, when the risks exists, when I realize in my cockpit that I can harm civilians in aiming at a military target, I pull back and return to base.”
BHL politely refrains from asking Asaf about how Israel’s policy of targeted assassinations which result in dozens of deaths of bystanders, many of them children.
Having Mir Hosein Musavi’s representative abroad keeping company with such a character has absolutely nothing to recommend it and will make the mass movement supporting democracy in Iran a potentially serious blow.
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