LEVY TO SPEAK ON ISLAMISM, GENOCIDE

The New York Sun
March 4, 2008 Tuesday

In a speech tomorrow evening at the 92nd Street Y, the French celebrity
philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy 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. Levy 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. Levy 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. Levy 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. Levy 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. Levy 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. Levy 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. Levy 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. Levy said that he favors
Senator Obama. Senator Obama has pledged that, if elected president,
he would recognize the Armenian genocide, although Mr. Levy 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."