Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French author, philosopher and activist. His next book, to be released in 2016, is Le Génie du Judaïsme.
Uncovering the keys to victory in the war against Islamic State
The West, Bernard-Henri Lévy writes from Paris, possesses all of the means necessary to defeat the Islamic State, should it choose to do so
Democratic countries may be afraid to use this word, but in a protracted fight against the Islamic State, Bernard-Henri Lévy says it's time we accept this conflict for what it is: war. (ECPAD–French Defence Ministry/Reuters)
So it's war. A new kind of war. A war with and without borders, with and without states, a war doubly new because it blends the nonterritorial model of al-Qaeda with the old territorial paradigm to which the Islamic State has returned.
But a war all the same. And, faced with this war unwanted by the United States, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and now France, only one question is worth asking: What should we do? How, when a war like this is forced upon you, do you respond and win?
Principle number 1: Do not play with words. Call things by their right names. Dare to utter the terrible word "war," a word that the democracies try to push out of the range of hearing, beyond the bounds of their imagination, their symbolic system and their reality. This aversion to war is their mission, their distinguishing trait and their crowning glory, but it is also their weakness.
Recall the nobility and the candour of Léon Blum revealing, in a famous debate with Élie Halévy in the 1930s, that he could not grasp the notion of democracy at war, except as a contradiction.
Recall the dignity but also the limits of the great consciences of humanism in the second half of that same decade, when they watched with alarm as Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois and others from the College of Sociology called for the intellectual rearmament of a world that believed, then as now, that it was done with its dark past and with history.
That is where we stand today. Thinking the unthinkable: war. Accepting the oxymoron of a modern republic required to wage war to save itself.
And thinking it all the more painfully because none of the rules laid down by theoreticians of war, from Thucydides to Clausewitz, seems to apply to that non-existent state that brings fire from a distance that is all the greater because its front lines are fluid and its fighters have the tactical advantage of making no distinction between what we call life and what they call death.
France's government understands this. French political leaders across the spectrum have voiced their unanimous support. That leaves you, me and society, both collectively and individually. Each of us, this time, is a target, a front line, a soldier without knowing it, a cell of resistance, a locus of mobilization and of biopolitical fragility. The idea is heartbreaking and appalling, but it is a fact that we must face.
Principle number 2: The enemy. To utter the word "war" is to evoke an enemy. As Carl Schmitt taught, we must deal with the enemy as enemy, viewing him as someone to be tricked, outmanoeuvred, tangled up in negotiations or struck silently, depending on the tactics adopted, but in no case appeased. But, following St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and every other theoretician of just war, we must also call the enemy by his true name.
That name is not "terrorism." It is not a dispersed collection of "lone wolves" or "lunatics."
And, as for the relentless culture of excuses that persists in portraying these death squads as oppressed and excluded individuals pushed to the edge by an unjust society, and forced by poverty to execute young people whose only crime is to like rock music, soccer or a cool autumn night at a sidewalk café, that is an insult to the world's poor as well as to the dead.
No. These ignorant men who level their guns at the gift of life, and at the freedom of movement and expression of the world's great cities; who detest the urban spirit as much as they do the underlying spirit of laws, rights and peaceful autonomy of people freed from ancient subjections; who could benefit, if only the words were not so utterly foreign to them, from Victor Hugo's protest in response to the massacres of the Commune: that attacking Paris is worse than attacking France because it destroys the world – these men should rightfully be labelled fascists. Better: fascislamists. Better: The product of the grafting that Paul Claudel saw coming when he noted in his journal for May 21, 1935, in one of those insights that occur only to the truly great: "Hitler's speech? A kind of Islamism is being created at the centre of Europe."
What is the advantage of naming things accurately? To place the cursor right where it belongs. To remind us that against such an adversary, war must be waged without truce or mercy. And to require each of us, everywhere, in the Arab-Muslim world as on the rest of the planet, to say why we are fighting, alongside whom and against whom.
Of course, this does not mean that Islam, any more than other systems of thought, has any special affinity for the worst. It does not. And the urgency of the fight forced upon us must not distract us from that other vital battle, the battle for the other Islam, for enlightened Islam, for the Islam of the heirs of Afghanistan's Massoud, Bosnia's Izetbegovic, Bangladesh's Mujibur Rahman, the Kurdish nationalists and the Sultan of Morocco, who, against orders from the Vichy government, made the heroic decision to save the Jews of his realm.
But that implies two things, or rather three. First, an understanding that the Islamic lands are the only parts of the world that never underwent the work of remembrance and grieving done by the Germans, French, other Europeans and Japanese, because in much of the Islamic world, the myth has persisted that the fascist storm of the 1930s was contained within the perimeter of Europe.
Next, the need to emphasize even more clearly the critical, primordial opposition between the two visions of Islam, two visions that are locked in a war to the death, two visions that constitute, if we must continue to use this phrase, the only clash of civilizations that matters.
And, finally, the acknowledgment that this process of identification and demarcation, this inking of the line along which the allies of Tariq Ramadan and others of his ilk face off against the friends of the great Abdelwahab Meddeb, this process of separating whatever might feed the "Viva la muerte" of the new nihilists from the ideological, scriptural and spiritual work that is needed to keep the ghosts from returning or emerging in new forms – must fall primarily to Muslims themselves. I know the objection. Right-thinkers complain loudly that to ask good citizens to dissociate themselves from a crime they did not commit is to imply their complicity and thus to stigmatize them.
That is not the point. The "not in our name" that we hear from French Muslims is no different from that uttered by Israelis dissociating themselves 15 years ago from the policy of their government on the West Bank. No different from that of the millions of Americans who, in 2003, protested against the absurd war in Iraq.
No different from that of British Muslims who, more recently, took it upon themselves to declare that there is a gentle and peaceful Islam that has nothing to do with the Islam in whose name a soldier can suddenly be stabbed on a sidewalk. "Not in our name" is a noble cry; a noble gesture. But what is needed now above all else is the simple act, essential in war, of isolating the enemy, cutting his supply lines and no longer allowing him to swim like a fish in the water of a community of which he is, in fact, the shame.
To speak the word "war" also implies, inevitably, the identification, the marginalization and, ideally, the neutralization of that part of the enemy camp that is operating at home. Which is what Churchill did when, upon the outbreak of war, he imprisoned 2,000 people considered to be domestic enemies, some as close to him as his own cousin, George Pitt-Rivers, second-in-command of the British fascist party.
And, making due allowance for situational differences, that is what France must do by banning those who preach hate; by placing under closer surveillance the thousands of persons already classified as potential jihadis; and by persuading social networks in the United States not to allow calls for kamikaze killings to proliferate in the shadow of the First Amendment.
It is a tricky undertaking. As emergency legislation always is. And for that reason, it is more essential than ever that we not shrink from our obligation to offer asylum to Syrians fleeing fascislamist terror. Essential that we continue to welcome migrants while working to eliminate as many as possible of the cells bent on murder. That we widen our embrace of anti-IS refugees in proportion to our efforts to deal firmly with those among them who would pursue their criminal missions.
Doing both at once is not a contradiction. First, it is the only way to deny the enemy the victory of watching us betray the open and generous mutual tolerance that is the pride of our democracies. And second, I repeat, it supports a strategy critical in all just wars, which is to prevent from coming together forces that can and should be kept apart – while reaffirming to the vast majority of France's Muslims that they are not only our allies, but also our fellow citizens.
I come now to the heart of the matter. The real source of this flood of horror. And that is IS, which occupies a good third of Syria and Iraq and provides to the perpetrators of possible future Bataclans the rearguard bases without which none of this would be possible.
Last week, in Sinjar, Iraq, Kurdish forces backed by the international coalition won a decisive victory. I could cite many examples over the past six months in which the Kurds have routed IS's rabble army without a fight.
This was the situation two decades ago in Sarajevo, when putative experts raised the spectre of the hundreds of thousands of ground troops that would have to be deployed to prevent ethnic cleansing from reaching its grisly apogee. Yet, it turned out that a handful of special forces, backed by strikes, was sufficient. I am convinced that the IS hordes are much braver when blowing the heads off defenceless young Parisians than when facing real soldiers of freedom. Similarly, I believe the global community possesses all of the means necessary to defeat the threat it faces, should it choose to do so.
What holds us back? Why have we been so stinting in assisting our Kurdish allies? What is it about this war that the United States of Barack Obama, at least for the moment, seems not to really want to win? I do not know the answer. But I know where the key lies. And I know the alternative to using the key: No boots on their ground means more blood on ours.
Cette merde vaut une tarte :
Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) entarté par Noël Godin à Namur (30 mai 2015)
Tiens, princesse, prends quelques quenelles pour faciliter la digestion :
Dieudonné humilie BHL en Tunisie !
______
~~~ Une réfutation ~~~
The (not so) Great Bernard-Henri Lévy
May 14, 2013
Bernard-Henri Lévy: "Philosopher" and Murderous Fool
Lampoon inspired by (and loosely based on) this football (soccer) essay by Lévy. If the shallow employ of a 900-liter bag of words makes a philosopher, I suppose Lévy qualifies.
PARIS – Here is one of the greatest fools of all time – a cad, a scent of excrement for the entire planet, to be universally acclaimed. Here is a carbuncle who, in front of 7 billion people, fondled his balls as though rolling for snake eyes in a die cup, all the while imagining no one would see, ascertaining the final truth in relation to one of the most extraordinary debacles in imperialism's history.
Here is a man of pomposity, a buffoon, who imagined himself (like Homer Simpson in his crouch of grunt and beer) to be the only one who could avert his nation's colonial decline. Better yet, here's a super-EGO who – unlike Simpson – did not wait for a flatulent explosion (in the guise of Nicolas Sarkozy) to come begging him to re-enlist; rather, he decided himself, spontaneously, after having "heard" a rumor calling to him, to return from his North African exile and – putting his ludicrous persona on, while flanked by faithful prostitutes (the planned National Transitional Council, Al Qaida, MOSSAD) – reversed the Benghazis' ill fortune and led a successful coup d'état.
And this sordid fright, who is a "perfect" hair's breadth from victory and just minutes from the end of a historic deceit (and of a career that will carry him into the Pantheon of frauds after L. Ron Hubbard, Victor Lustig, and Charles Ponzi); this Cerberus who, with fifty false personalities, has known the rut, the imperial priapism, and finally, the imagined slight with helpless remonstrations; this preening fop, upon whom the blue adorns a pimp's pride in stain of rape, who had only the very last steps to scale to enter ignominy for good, commits the predictably incomprehensible act that amounts to disqualification from the public ritual – the final image of him that will go down in history and, in lieu of apotheosis, will cast him into hell.
—
Everyone will know, as I write, what actually happened on the field of Tripoli's usurpation.
Everyone will know what the faux philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, did and said (in the debacle that NATO bombs had dominated with all their grace) to waken old colonial demons in children from the streets of Algiers, the very demons that NATO's history of lies – its ethic, its aesthetic, its propaganda – are made to quell.
Even if we knew why; even if we knew for certain whether the extinct North African Sephardic insulted him, or rightfully cursed his mother, father, brothers, sister; even if we got hold of the black box of those two days that saw this moron demonstrate in a flash his legend that is a mix of narcissist king; a Rasputinish love for a Hungarian midget; the past mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine; and, last but not least, the bombastic NATO captain leading troops to consecration with the shedding of brown people's blood; even if we knew the whole story, this man's suicide would be as all ordinary suicides are; no reason in the world explains the desperate act of a man's vanity – no provocation, no naturally nasty personality, will ever tell us why the planetary icon that Bernard-Henri Lévy has imagined himself to be; a man with more philosophical faults than any pedophile pope; a freak, the non-chosen one, this great priest-by-self-consensus of the new cult oil barons' empire-in-the-making, chose to ejaculate on history right here, rather than wait to settle for sanity on the sideline.
No. The truth is that it is perhaps not so easy to stay unsullied in the skin of a self-imagined icon, narcissist demigod, faux hero, paranoid fascist pop-legend.
The only plausible explanation for so bizarrely scuttling everything – which, remember, let a lot of time go by (the four long months following NATO's precisely calculated first bomb dropped) in order to concentrate itself into the outburst of an orgy of oilmen stupidly losing control of their militia – the only explanation is that there was in this fraud a kind of public recoil, an ultimate inner revolt, against the synthetic parabola, the stupid statue, the beastified monument, that the era had transformed Libya into over these past months.
—
The man's insurrection against the natural saint. A self-imagined crown of Napoleon that he then, quite logically, pulverized with the involuntary moron's head-butt of unconscious truth, the inescapable war lords and the 'NEW' philosophy of rapes and torture, as though saying: I am a living stupidity, a fetish; a self-anointed god of the unrestrained loins of man's most evil passions, an empty hologram but for image of rapine, this new age fascist guru, this decidedly stunted mentality suffering delusion's grandeur so blind as Oedipus in his madness, this North African natural heir of Laval and Bousquet, which a peculiar mania had turned him into.
It was as though he were, in parody, self-authoring one of the very great titles of this past century, the sinecure acquired via petro-triumph's laurels of this liturgy of insanity, performance, and commodity: Narcissist Homo, This Is Rape. Yes, a rape, a true rape, not one of these absurd monsters or synthetic stars created by the money of brand names in combination with the sighs of the Hollywood crowd.
Rasputin had his moment. Bernard-Henri Lévy will have had his – this one magnificent and rebellious thing, reality, that will have brought his reputation, suddenly, solidly, into the ranks of history's shameless pimp brothel-hoods.
**
Paraphrasing a former MI5 agent I had seen interviewed about life under Qaddhafi: If one were not particularly political, a citizen could go about a normal life, attain free education, travel and study abroad, and enjoy a standard of living approximating that of a middle-class American; the envy of North Africa. Since the 'fall of Tripoli', a $5 taxi ride from the airport has gone up to $500. The capital and the country are divided into fiefs by competing tribal warlords, and the militias are refusing to disarm; women's rights have vanished; and torture, murder, and rape are rampant throughout the country. In the end, it is likely that the rank-and-file Libyan citizenry will look back and wish they'd never heard of 'democracy'.
Read about Lévy's push to war in Libya here.
Read about the immediate humanitarian consequences here and here.
http://ronaldthomaswest.com/2013/05/14/the-great-bernard-henry-levy/
Bernard-Henri Lévy: What Was Done in Libya Can Be Done in Syria (MEMRI hasbara July 27, 2012)
Zionist Bernard-Henri Lévy - The godfather of the so-called Arab Spring
Bernard-Henri Lévy veut censurer YouTube et Dailymotion, cause Dieudonné
Comme vous le constatez, ce connard casher vaut davantage de tartes à la crème en pleine gueule :
BHL : Anthologie pâtissière de l'entarté
BHL en dégustation de quenelles à Lyon
Déchéance de la nationalité française pour BHL
Alain Soral pulvérise BHL
Sa soeur devient chrétienne : BHL est "foudroyé"
La vérité sur Bernard-Henri Lévy - Agence Info Libre
La vérité sur Bernard-Henri Lévy (A la loupe 2 - Episode 2)
///BBK ACTU 19- BHL: Sa Majesté vous insulte en public!
Quenelle ouverte à Bernard-Henri Lévy… Merci Dieudonné
Requiem pour un con - Serge Gainsbourg : karaoké, dédié à BHL (1948– ?)
More/Plus:
"BHL, retourne en Israël !"
Pourquoi invite-t-on toujours BHL
Il y a quatre ans, Mouammar Kadhafi était mis à mort par les mercenaires de BHL et Sarkozy
Le CRIF fait des listes
Encore un agent d'Israël entarté
Quand la France perd son humour
+++ BHL
Psyop in Paris - "Bombing"/Shooting Spree - « Je Suis Crisis Actor » - Multi-Site SAMU (EMT) Exercise on Nov. 13 - NATO–Gladio–Zionist Strategy of Tension - Trauma-Based Mind Control for the Masses - Manufacturing a Pretext for More Domestic Repression & Foreign Wars - Western "Intelligence" Agencies & "Security" Services Steeped in (Rothschild) Fraud and State Criminality - Stratégie Triangulaire, Sous Faux Drapeau (False Flag)
Dieudonné, Soral, and the French Resistance - Struggle Between the French People and the Zionist Plutocracy - Media Censorship or Free Speech? - Inserting a Quenelle Into Zionism's Butt - Anti-Establishment Gesture - A Political Earthquake in France - Equality and Reconciliation
The Problem of the Gas Chambers / Le problème des chambres à gaz (Robert Faurisson)
Françafrique - La raison d'État - L'argent roi - French Corporatism in Africa - 'Stable' Tyrants = Predictable Profitability - Resource Extraction
Soral & Dieudo VS Charlie: "4 millions de couillons derrière Netanyahu!"
François la sens-tu qui se glisse dans ton cul, la quenelle !
Voulez-vous des quenelles ? Prends-en trois, BHL !
BHL chez ses co-adeptes judéo-maçonniques du B'nai B'rith, Jérusalem 1980
Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948– ?) avec le baron Guy de Rothschild (1909–2007)
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