Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy    (propagandist)
Born	5 November 1948 French Algeria
Nationality	French
Alma mater	Lycée Louis-le-Grand, École Normale Supérieure
Religion	Jewish
Member of	"The New Humanitarians", Banned from Russia 2015, European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, Justice for Kurds
Interests	• anti-communism • war mongering • humanitarian interventions • 2011 Attacks on Libya • 2014 Ukraine coup • Svetlana Tikhanovskaya
A French 'philosopher' who has created an intellectual alibi for every US/NATO intervention since the 1980's. A militant supporter and apologist for Zionism and the Israeli state

Bernard-Henri Lévy (often shortened to BHL). is a French 'philosopher' who has created an intellectual alibi for every US/NATO intervention since the 1980's. He is a militant supporter of Zionism and the Israeli state

Early life

Lévy was born in 1948 in the town of Béni Saf in French Algeria, to an affluent Algerian Jewish family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father is the founder and manager of a timber company, Becob, and became a multimillionaire from his business.

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy made his way into the elite and highly selective École Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy.

Lévy soon became a notable journalist. He created a progressive image by starting his career as a war correspondent for Combat, the newspaper founded underground by Albert Camus during the German occupation of France. In 1971, Lévy travelled to the Indian subcontinent, and was based in Bangladesh covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan.

He was a 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 developed an uncompromising critique of Marxist and socialist ways of analysing events.

On June 30, 1975, in the newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, Bernard-Henri Lévy lavishly praised the publication of a book by André Glucksmann, which drew a parallel between Nazism and Stalinism, by assigning Karl Marx responsibility for the Gulag prison camp system.

In 2004, Bernard-Henri Lévy's fortune amounted to 150 million euros. He is the owner of seven wealth management, real estate and financial companies. His fortune is claimed to mainly come from his parents' inheritance, supplemented by stock market investments.

1980s

In 1980, he participated in the founding of the association Action Against Hunger (Action contre la faim) with Marek Halter, Jacques Attali, Françoise Giroud and a few others, and it was he who drew up the association's charter. Six years later he dissociated himself from it, at the time of the Ethiopian famine and the great debate that shook certain NGOs on the "perverse effects" of aid; Bernard-Henri Lévy was in favor, like Doctors Without Borders, of stopping sending aid which, according to him, only strengthened and enriched the Ethiopian Communist government. On this point, he was in the minority.

In the same year, BHL and Marek Halter created the Human Rights Committee which campaigned for the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.

In September 1981, Bernard-Henri Lévy left for Pakistan with Marek Halter and Renzo Rossellini in order to hand over to the Afghan Mujahedin fighters three radio transmitters, bought by the Human Rights Committee and used by "Radio Kabul", which called for the armed resistance against the Soviet occupation.

Petition for US intervention in Nicaragua

In 1985, the CIA noted in one of its reports that the influence of Bernard-Henri Lévy and the "new philosophers", who had become "sensational media personalities" thanks to "intellectual television and radio broadcasts that the French love so much”, had helped to win the battle of opinion in France. This "climate" would notably cover the support of the United States for anti-communist dictatorships and paramilitary groups in Central America. Note that the petition contains massive amounts of US propaganda tropes, like "the integration of all of Central America into a single Marxist-Leninist entity". The list of petitioners contains several public people with known CIA connections.

International Resistance 
To the attention of the United States Congress
The future of democracy is currently at stake in Nicaragua. After four years of dictatorship (May 80 - November 84) a totalitarian party - the FSLN - has failed to break down the resistance of a people. As the elections demonstrated, and despite pressure from the FSLN, more than half of Nicaraguan voters refused to vote. The proclamation of a state of emergency shows that after the relative openness of these elections, the political project of the FSLN remains the establishment of totalitarianism. This is why we consider that aid to all sectors of the opposition is essential so that the Nicaraguans can get rid of the dictatorship of a totalitarian party and finally exercise this right that they seemed to have secured by overthrowing Somozist tyranny: freely choose their political future.
These reasons make us ask the Congress of the U.S.A., in a spirit of democratic solidarity, to renew aid to the Nicaraguan resistance.
The continuation of this aid is necessary from a strategic point of view: the Sandinista junta has never hidden that its goal is the integration of all of Central America into a single Marxist-Leninist entity. In this case, the United States would be forced to withdraw from one of its main overseas treaties, and this is precisely the objective sought by the Soviet strategy: to force the United States to withdraw from the regions which represent vital importance for themselves and the Free World. In this regard, the problem of Central America - Europe’s "fifth frontier" - is also a problem.
This help is also necessary from a moral point of view: the West must be consistent in the support it gives to those who fight to benefit from these rights that your own Declaration of Independence proclaimed inalienable and which, consequently , should belong to everyone.
We say to the Congress of the United States: denying aid to those seeking to exercise these rights would be tantamount to denying the spirit of your own country. If it fails in Nicaragua, the strategic situation in which the U.S.A. will find itself will be less serious than betraying the very principles on which your country was founded.
The freedom of the Nicaraguans is your freedom and ours. In this sense, it does not divide. If you fail in Nicaragua, we have the right to ask you: where will you fail next time? If freedom and democracy are not worth defending in your own hemisphere, where are they worth defending? The Free World awaits your response. Its enemies too.

1990s

In July 1993, he was appointed chairman of the supervisory board of the highbrow TV-channel Arte after a personal intervention by the French President François Mitterrand. A position he holds ever since.

On June 23, 1992, he suggested to François Mitterrand to support the president of the newly declared republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegović, isolated in the besieged Sarajevo. On the 27th, Hubert Védrine informs BHL that François Mitterrand, because of BHL's appeal, just went there.

BHL continues his strong commitment to Alija Izetbegović and the Bosnian Muslims, producing several movies and documentaries.

He later became a strong supporter of the NATO 'humanitarian war' in Kosovo.

2000s

At the end of 2001, he supported the intervention of the United States in Afghanistan.

In 2002 and 2003, he did not take a stand against the war in Iraq. In an article published in 2002, he writes that "this is not the place to defend this butcher of Kurds and Shiites, this terrorist, this suicidal megalomaniac, this madman, this Nero, who, in 1998 Afghan warlord Massoud already told me that he was in possession of massive chemical and bacteriological weapons ”. For these reasons, he finds this war "morally justified", but also "politically disastrous" notably because of the negative consequences he sees in the fight against terrorism.

In October 2007, BHL published a book, Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, about the French Socialist Party, where he warned against the dangerous developments which he saw. According to the him, the left is defined as the political current of "those who are anti-colonialist, pass a positive judgment on May 68, negative on Vichy and who recognize themselves in the fight of the Dreyfusards"... The left sees an evolution which leads it, according to Bernard-Henri Lévy "to become anti-American in a too systematic way, to turn away from the idea of freedom, to become complacent with regard to Al-Qaida and Hamas, to stop to be universalist or internationalist, becoming chauvinist." His leftist enemies are "all suspected of fascism, all excommunicated", the newspaper Libération commented ironically.

During the Russian-Georgian war in 2008, BHL went to Georgia, publishing the story of his trip in two pages "Testimonies" in Le Monde, strongly supporting the Georgian (anti-Russian) government side.

In January 2009, he published a note of support for Israel's operation Cast Lead in the Gaza strip.

2010s

On June 7, 2010, in an article in the newspaper Liberation, he declared that "Mein Kampf is a bestseller in Turkey" and defended the brutal Israeli attack on May 31, 2010 against a Turkish led convoy carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza.

On March 11, 2011, he actively supported the French position on the Libyan war, and supported Nicolas Sarkozy on the decision to establish a no-fly zone over Libya. He went to Libya several times to support the rebels against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi. Following the rebels' capture of Tripoli in August 2011, he declared that "it is a victory, because Sarkozy achieved in Libya what Mitterrand did no do in Bosnia".

Natalie Nougayrède then working for le Monde, (and later a leader in the Integrity Initiative) commented:

“For the 63-year-old philosopher, the Libyan adventure is the achievement of a lifetime. He finally made the great novel of freedom. After the ordeal of Sarajevo, after the cancellation of the Afghan Massoud's visit to Paris, after the armed non-interference in Darfur: Libya, a successful operation! BHL, a new romantic Byron, regarded himself as the emancipator of a people. In all sincerity, BHL, a standard-bearer for the Libyan people."

On November 14, 2011, like his anti-Gaddafi position, he took a position against the Assad government in Syria, in an article published in Huffington Post.

On July 22, 2014, five days after the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17, he implicitly accuses Vladimir Putin of being responsible for it, supported Petro Poroshenko and denounced the European Union's pusillanimity towards the Russian President.

“I have great respect for Russian culture but great contempt for the current Russian authorities.”
Bernard-Henri Lévy (2014) 

“If Europe wants to adhere to its anti-fascist values than bear in mind that Russian Putinism is fascism,”
Bernard-Henri Lévy (2015) 

These quotes are remarkably hostile. Vladimir Putin at the time had a very high approval rating, which was due to the limited actions he took during the 2014 conflict in Ukraine. That Lévy is aware of this fact is a given, and still he is willing to engage in this kind of rhetoric which estranges 70%+ percent of the Russian population. This shows, that he will push his viewpoints and agenda forward through aggression and really isn't giving much about the people of any given country.

In February 2015, Bernard-Henri Lévy went to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he met Peshmerga fighters who clash with IS troops. In media, he defends the cause of the Kurds in struggle with "the incomparable barbarity of the ISIS head cutters." He said: "It is the Kurds who are fighting on the front line against Daesh." They are the only ones, according to him, who can" concretely help Christians of the East". On March 31, 2015, he led a delegation of Kurdish fighters to the Elysée Palace, to meet President François Hollande and the Minister of Defense, Jean-Yves Le Drian. On the same day, he organized a rally to support the Kurds.

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