Diversity Macht Frei
December 29, 2016
Fake “French” philosopher (((Bernard-Henri Lévy))) has a new book coming out called The Genius of Judaism.
Jews are not a “chosen people,” Lévy explains, but a “treasure” whose spirit must continue to inform moral thinking and courage today.
From the publisher’s blurb, in which BHL is ridiculously described as “Europe’s foremost philosopher”, it sounds like a typical Jewish ethno-activist tome in which we Gentiles are told how almost everything good in our society comes from the Jews (“He reveals the overlooked Jewish roots of Western democratic ideals”) while anyone who dares question the value of the Jewish contribution to our civilisational well-being is attacked (“Lévy offers a fresh, surprising critique of a new and stealthy form of anti-Semitism on the rise as well as a provocative defense of Israel from the left.”)
Like many Jewish intellectuals he asserts that Jews have a duty to disrupt the societies and cultures they live in while simultaneously attacking as “bigots” and “haters” any Gentiles who dare to point out that Jews tend to disrupt the societies and cultures they live in, or claim that such disruption is undesirable.
The Genius of Judaism is a breathtaking new vision and understanding of what it means to be a Jew, a vision quite different from the one we’re used to. It is rooted in the Talmudic traditions of argument and conflict, rather than biblical commandments, borne out in struggle and study, not in blind observance. At the very heart of the matter is an obligation to the other, to the dispossessed, and to the forgotten, an obligation that, as Lévy vividly recounts, he has sought to embody over decades of championing “lost causes,” from Bosnia to Africa’s forgotten wars, from Libya to the Kurdish Peshmerga’s desperate fight against the Islamic State, a battle raging as we speak.
BHL is doing a round of interviews and events to promote his new book.
BHL: Judaism is not an “identity”, it’s an “otherness” and a relationship to the universal.
Interviewer: Is there thus a difference in kind between the affirmation of the Jewish religion and the affirmation of other religions?
BHL: My thesis is, indeed, that Judaism is not a religion.
Interviewer:…for you, there is no major impossibility in being Jewish and French?
BHL: I know that a certain number of my fellow citizens are asking themselves if they should leave France. My conviction is that it’s not for them, but the antisemites, these “skinhead intellectuals” [crânes rasés de la pensée, literally “skinheads of thought”] to leave it.
It’s worth recalling just how ridiculous BHL’s claim to be a philosopher is. This article is from 2010.
Mr Lévy, who in France goes simply by his initials BHL, has been doing the media rounds to promote his new work, On War in Philosophy. In his book, which has received lavish praise from some quarters, the open-shirted Mr Lévy lays into the philosopher Immanuel Kant as being unhinged and a “fake”.
To support his claims, he cites a certain Jean-Baptiste Botul, whom he describes as a post-War authority on Kant. But the chorus of approval turned to laughter after a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur pointed out that Mr Botul does not exist: he is a fictional character created in by a contemporary satirical journalist, Frédéric Pagès.
Alarm bells should have rung given that Mr Pagès, a journalist with Le Canard Enchaîneé, a satirical weekly, has penned one book under the Botul pseudonym entitled The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.
He has even given rise to a school of philosophical thought called Botulism – a play on words with the lethal disease – and has created a theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” the Metaphysics of the Flabby.
But Mr Lévy missed the joke, citing Mr Botul from a “series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay” he supposedly gave after the war, in which he said that “their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance”.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is not a philosopher. He is a buffoon.