Jew Corrupter: Bernard-Henri Lévy (France)

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Bernard-Henri Lévy
 (French pronunciation: [bɛʁnaʁ ɑ̃ʁi levi]; born November 5, 1948)
 is a French  public intellectual, philosopher and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL,[1]  he was one of the leaders of the "Nouvelle Philosophie" (New Philosophy) movement in 1976.

Life and career

 Early life

Lévy was born in Béni Saf, Algeria to a wealthy Sephardi Jewish family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the multi-millionaire founder and manager of a timber company, Becob.

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy enrolled in the elite and highly selective École Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Some of his professors there included prominent French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. Lévy is also a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war reporter for Combat, the famous underground newspaper founded by Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. In 1971, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent, and was in Bangladesh covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan. This experience was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangla-Desh, Nationalism in the Revolution"), which was published in 1973.

New Philosophers

Returning to Paris, Lévy became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas.[2] Throughout the 1970s, Lévy taught a course on epistemology at the Université de Strasbourg and he taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. It was in 1977, on the television show Apostrophes[3], that Lévy was presented, alongside André Glucksmann, as a nouveau philosophe. In the very same year he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.
[edit] Intellectual involvement

In 1981 Lévy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work, in which he offers a dark picture of French history. It was strongly criticized for its journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history by some of the most respected French academics — including Raymond Aron (see his Memoirs).

Lévy was one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in the Bosnian War in the 1990s, and spoke out early about Serbian concentration camps. He referred to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust as providing a lesson that mass murder cannot be ignored by those in other nations.[4]

When his father died in 1995, Lévy became the manager of the Becob company, until it was sold in 1997 for 750 million francs to the French entrepreneur François Pinault.

At the end of the 1990s, he founded with Benny Lévy and André Glucksmann an Institute on Levinassian Studies at Jerusalem.

Political positions

He drew controversy due to his support of the Iraq War, in 2003.

In 2003, Lévy wrote an account of his efforts to track the murderer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been beheaded by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the time of Pearl's death, Lévy was visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy.[5] He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, argues it was because Pearl knew too much about the links between Pakistan's secret service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book won praise for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world's most dangerous regions but was condemned by the British historian of India and travel writer, William Dalrymple (amongst others), for its lack of rigour and its caricatural depictions of Pakistani society, as well as his decision to fictionalize Pearl's thoughts in the closing moments of his life.[6][7][8][9] The book was also criticized, in common with his other works, for being neither journalism nor philosophy, but attempting to be both.

Although Levy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his breakthrough in the English language was with the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly. In the series, "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville", Levy imitated his compatriot and predecessor in American critique, Alexis de Tocqueville, criss-crossing America, interviewing Americans and recording his observations first for magazine and then book publication.

In March 2006 a letter Lévy co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly protests in the Muslim world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. When questioned about the Niqab face-veil worn by some Muslim women, during the United Kingdom debate over veils, Lévy told the Jewish Chronicle that "the veil is an invitation to rape".[10]

With the aid of real Washington political advisers, Italian conceptual artist, Francesco Vezzoli, created two commercials for competing US presidential campaigns - pitting Sharon Stone against Bernard-Henri Lévy - in a project entitled Democrazy, shown at the 2007 Venice Biennal.

 Recent activities

In September 2008, Lévy toured the United States to promote his book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.

On June 24, 2009, Levy posted a video on Dailymotion in support of the Iranian protesters who were being repressed after the contested elections.[11]

He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the La Règle du Jeu ("The Rule of the Game") magazine. He writes a weekly column in the magazine Le Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.

Through the 2000s, Lévy argued that the world must pay more attention to the crisis in Darfur.[4]

In January 2010, he publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community.[12]

At the opening of the "Democracy and its Challenges" conference in Tel Aviv (May 2010) Levy gave a very high estimation of the Israel Defense Forces, saying "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy."[13]


Criticisms

Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie française faced strong rebuttals, from noted intellectuals such as historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Aron and Gilles Deleuze, who called Lévy's methods "vile"[14]. Their most common accusation towards Lévy is of him being one-sided and, ultimately, shallow as a thinker. In this regard, they point to his support for Israel. Vidal-Naquet went as far as saying: "BHL's intellectual dishonesty is properly unfathomable".

Critics of Lévy include French journalists Jade Lindgaard and Xavier de la Porte who wrote a biography of the philosopher. They claimed that "In all his works and articles, there is not a single philosophical proposition." The book is contested, however, and Lévy sought legal action against the authors.[citation needed].

More recently, in the essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010), Lévy was embarrassed[15] when he used, as a central point of his refutation of Kant, the writings of French "philosopher" Jean-Baptiste Botul. The Times dubbed him a "laughing stock."[16] It turned out that Botul's writings are actually well-known as spoofs and that Botul himself is the fictional creation of a French living journalist and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès [17].

Lévy's writing and speaking style is regularly lambasted as grandiloquent and smug by fringe essayists and popular satirical TV puppet show Les Guignols de l'info, in which Lévy has his own puppet.

Another round of criticisms addresses Lévy's reliance on his connections with the French literary and business circles to promote his works. Lévy had for years business ties with billionaire François Pinault, befriended Jean-Luc Lagardère, who owned Hachette Livre, the largest publisher in France, and Hachette Filipacchi Médias, the largest magazine publisher in the world. Lévy was even briefly related to Jean-Paul Enthoven, publisher of Grasset (a novel and essay division of Hachette Livre), when his daughter Justine Lévy was married to Enthoven's son Raphaël. Lévy has been chairman of the supervisory board for French-German cutural TV channel Arte, was for years a columnist for French newspaper Le Monde and is currently a columnist for both news magazine Le Point (owned by François Pinault) and national daily newspaper Libération, in addition to being a shareholder and member of the supervisory board. In the essay Une imposture française, journalists Nicolas Beau and Olivier Toscer claim that Lévy uses his unique position as an influential member of both the literary and business establishments in France to be the go-between between the two worlds, which helps him to get positive reviews as marks of gratitude, while silencing dissenters.

For instance, Beau and Toscer noted that most of the reviews published in France for Who Killed Daniel Pearl? didn't mention strong denials about the book given by experts and Pearl's own family including wife Marianne Pearl who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his own ego"[citation needed].

Other critics of Lévy attack[citation needed] his support of the Mitterrand doctrine that allows Italian terrorist members of Brigate Rosse to live in France as free men and women despite the fact that the Italian courts have sentenced them to long imprisonment or life sentence. Lévy argues that during the late 1970s and 1980s basic human rights were not respected in Italy.[citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_L%C3%A9vy