Lévy To Speak On Islamism, Genocide
In a speech tomorrow evening at the 92nd Street Y, the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy will argue that Islamic extremism is a direct descendent of 20th-century forms of fascism and constitutes the greatest threat to Jews today.
"When you look at the program of Hamas" or Hezbollah, Mr. Lévy said in an interview last week, "the conception of blood, of race, of the relationship between them and Jews, [and] how seriously they take 'The Protocol of the Elders of Zion' — you see that their inspiration and the content of their ideology is very similar to the content of the ideology of the Nazis." In his speech, the annual Francine and Abdallah Simon State of World Jewry Lecture, Mr. Lévy will also argue that Jews have a special responsibility to recognize as genocide the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. The debate about whether the actions of the Turks against the Armenians constituted genocide is a deeply contentious one. Turkey does not recognize the killings as genocide, and referring to them as such is a prosecutable crime there. In 2007, a Turkish-Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, who had been prosecuted several times for speaking out on the genocide question, was murdered by a Turkish nationalist.
Jewish Americans are divided about the issue, in part because Turkey is Israel's closest ally in the Middle East. One of the sponsors of a Congressional resolution proposed last year that would have condemned the massacre of Armenians as genocide, Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, is Jewish — as are several others of the bill's supporters. But several Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, opposed the bill, which was ultimately dropped because of opposition by the Bush administration and fierce lobbying from Turkey. In the interview, Mr. Lévy compared denial of the Armenian genocide to denial of the Holocaust.
"There is a second crime which consists in denying the crime — it is always like this," he said. "As Jews we are too much ourselves victims of the denial to accept the denial when it applies to others." Some historians, including Bernard Lewis, argue that there is insufficient evidence that the killings represented a premeditated plan on the part of the Turkish government to exterminate the Armenians, comparable to Hitler's "Final Solution." Many Turks see the killings as the unpremeditated consequence of the government's relocation of the Armenians, due to concerns that they sympathized with the enemy.
Mr. Lévy emphatically dismissed both arguments. "The Nazis said the same about the Jews," he said. "They said that the Jews weakened them in the war against the English and the Russians — that the Jews were a sort of internal fifth column, which weakened them from inside. This is the same sort of argument."
Mr. Lévy has argued that genocide denial should be a prosecutable crime. In a speech last year to a gathering in Paris organized by the Coordination Council of Armenian Organizations of France, his case reached a classically Gallic level of abstraction. The distinguishing feature of genocide, he argued, is that the crime includes within itself its own simultaneous denial and revisionism. While he backed this up concretely, invoking the Nazis' practice of using euphemisms to disguise their plan of extermination, and the existence of a commando unit assigned to dig up bodies of Jews and burn them, his premise allowed him to conclude that Turkey's denial today is itself the final coda of the crime:
"Denying it 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, or 90 years after the fact," he said, "is a cynical, sordid, horrible way to continue the crime, to reproduce it, and to finish it so that the crime becomes perfect." Asked by The Sun whether Turkey should be allowed to join the European Union, Mr. Lévy said that its entrance should be predicated on three conditions: that it stop denying the Armenian genocide, put an end to anti-Semitism in Turkey, and oppose Islamism, even, he said, "the soft kind," including students wearing the veil in Turkish schools and universities.
Mr. Lévy said that Western governments' response to Islamic extremism should be, in the first place, "no appeasement, no acceptance," and, in the second, aid to individuals who are fighting Islamic extremism in their own countries. He has urged France, for instance, to naturalize and offer protection to the Dutch writer and former member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is considered at risk for assassination because of her criticism of Islam.
Asked about the American election, Mr. Lévy said that he favors Senator Obama. Senator Obama has pledged that, if elected president, he would recognize the Armenian genocide, although Mr. Lévy did not mention this as a reason for his support. He did say: "I think that about Israel and about the Jewry [Obama] is quite okay, as okay as [senators] Clinton and McCain."
