Bernard-Henri Levy was on Charlie Rose today (rebroadcast from last night), introduced as a philosopher and as Rose's friend. He struck me as a comic character, full of easy piety and drama, vain, and taking a swipe at a man who can think circles around him, Noam Chomsky.
Levy's theme, and of his book too I imagine, is that the left has excused the crimes of the Islamists, as they excused the crimes of the Communists in Stalin's day. The left is too quick to blame the U.S. for everything. Of course, China is bad, too, and he called for sanctions; though he didn't mention Tibet, just Darfur, China's support of Sudan.
I had much the same reaction to Levy as I do to his friend Paul Berman, who wrote a long exhausting piece in the New Republic a couple years ago about the left embracing Tariq Ramadan. Berman was obviously right about the left having a double standard, and Levy is right, too. The lack of freedom in Islamic authoritarian countries shouldn't be ignored. It's real. I agree. I've been to four Arab societies, and as I've said before, the women don't seem to have a place in public culture, and free speech is at a low level. The bookstore in Aleppo, Syria–deeply demoralizing. I think I saw one kid reading a book in Syria.
The problem is, and the reason BHL seems empty, What are we supposed to do about it? As James North has pointed out on this blog, the time for action in Sudan, if there ever was one, was years ago, including when the government was putting down a rebellion in the south. Even then, it might have been a mess. The invasion of Iraq, which Berman pushed for, was a horrible mistake. I'm for sanctions against China because of its thuggish occupation of Tibet.
Meantime, Levy, and Berman too (in his book Terror and Liberalism), say nothing about the occupation in Palestine. Levy adores Israel; as always, I wonder how much this drives his views on "Islamofascism," as they seem to drive Berman's. Here, for instance, the philosophe holds the hand of Israel's defense minister during the horrifying Lebanon war. I talk about the occupation constantly on this blog because this is something the West can do to free the Arab world. It can demonstrate that we don't have a double standard when it comes to human rights. That when our close friends are abusing people's rights, we go after them. By pressuring Israel, or cutting off the endless encouragement of its militant behavior, we could strike a real blow for freedom across the Arab world.
