Schlagwort: Bernard-Henri Lévy

BHL’s silence on Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine

am Juni 21, 2023

BHL’s silence on Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine

In a recent article in Tablet Magazine by French author Bernard-Henri Lévy the complete victory of Ukraine in the ongoing Russian War in Ukraine is proclaimed. Lévy, known for his obsessive hatred of Russia, Communism and a fact based analysis of the conflict, urges the WEST to not stop fighting this War – until Russia has lost.

Lévy, who is Jewish, has obviously no problem at all with pro-Holocaust Memorials dedicated to Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine. He has no problems with Hundreds of streets named after people who wanted to eradicate the Jewish people from Ukraine during the Shoah, including Stepan Bandera, Yuri Polyanskiy, Dmytro Paliiv, Petro Gudzovatiy, Dmytro Gakh, Stepan Burdyn, Terentiy Pihotskiy, Vasyl Sydor, Omelyan Polovyi, Oleksa Babiy (who played a role in the worst massacre of the Shoah in Baby Yar near Kiew) and many others.

Lev Golinkin gives you a clear picture in the Jewish Forward of all these antisemites and Holocaust perpetrators – every single one of them has a street, memorial, football stadium or plaque named after them. All this happened in the last 30 years and it happens today and tomorrow, including streets named after Neo-Nazis.

Let me be clear:

Russia’s war is a criminal war of aggression that violates international law and must end immediately. But more weapons for Ukraine will prolong this war and cause many more deaths in Ukraine. And the US and Germany want more people to die and the war to continue, otherwise they would not continue to supply Ukraine with weapons and ammunition. What about complicity in the war through NATO’s decades of aggression? This includes NATO’s eastward expansion, although US Secretary of State James Baker promised Gorbachev (!) and the Soviets in February 1990 that NATO would itself in the event of a possible reunification of Germany not expand “one inch eastward”.

Without this promise by the US, Baker, and West-Germany’s Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the USSR would never ever had given their support for a re-unification of the two Germany’s. NATO expansion ever since was an act of imperialism and is one key factor why Russia fights this war. This is a scholarly explanation, not a support for Putin, to be clear. But I am disgusted by the anti-Russian hatred of Tablet Magazine and most mainstream journals and politicians in the US or Germany.

This war has a history. For sure, it did not start February 24, 2022. Worse, Ukrainian President Zelenskyi argued in an antisemitic manner and trivialized the Holocaust during a speech he gave via video to the Knesset by comparing the date of the start of the war with the founding of the German NAZI Party (NSDAP) in 1920 and even portrayed Ukraine as friends of Jews at the time !! In Israel, there was outrage about that kind of antisemitism and Holocaust distortion. What about Tablet Magazine and Lévy?

Russia will not lose this war – otherwise we might be facing the end of the world: an atomic war, first fought by the United States of America in August 1945 against Japan.

Ever since, our lives face a deadline every single day, because ever since August 6, 1945 and Hiroshima, the entire destrucion of all lives on earth is an option. ‘Thanks’ to the US Army, by the way.

In December 2021, the Russian Federation sent Ukraine, the US and NATO a peace plan for Ukraine. No response from the White House. Biden wanted the War and he got the War.

Then, in March 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett did broker a near to be reached ceasefire – but Boris Johnson, the UK and the US, also France and Germany prohibited that ceasefire, because it included a statement that Ukraine would never ever become member of NATO. Russia, though, would have withdrawn all forces – all forces – to the lines prior to February 24, 2022. Ukraine was even interested in that deal, according to Bennett! But the UK, the US and the West rejected peace!!

Bernard-Henri Lévy, whom I defended against antisemitic resentment in my recent book (dealing with forms of antisemitism in the late 1970s), is an agitator and warmonger. He loves war and he hates peace and Russia. He has no problem with pro-Holocaust Memorials in Ukraine, otherwise he could not have written in Tablet Magazine:

On the other (Ukraine) is a citizens army defending not just their country but also a certain idea of civilization and of Europe: So, as a consequence, they understand why they fight.

That is an obscure fantasy of a French writer with no real knowledge of the history of NATO since 1990 and no real knowledge of streets and memorials named after Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine.

Contrary to Lévy, I am against this war. This war, like all others like in Yemen or Ethiopia, has to stop immediately. Stop sending weapons to Ukraine now! Support both Russian and Ukrainian men and women, who flee the warzone and reject military service. Support these men and women!!

Support diplomatic efforts to solve this conflict. Reject NATO’s and Putin’s imperialism likewise – and fight for peace in Europe.

And stop Lévy and Tablet Magazine and their one-sided, irrational and obsessive hatred of Russia and their denial of pro-Holocaust political culture in Ukraine, which you can witness in almost every single city or village in Western Ukraine.

Fight Holocaust distortion and pro-Holocaust Memorials named after people like Jaroslav Stetsko who wrote on July 9, 1941:

I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.

Later, in 1983, he made shake hands with then US Vice President George H.W. Bush:

Antisemites such as Jaroslav Stetsko are honored in today’s Ukraine, as Lev Golinkin has shown in his groundbreaking study for the Jewish Forward on January 27, 2021.

It is this silence of BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy) that is a typical sign of a decline in historical knowledge, historical accuracy and morality.

The current war started at the latest in 2014 at the MAIDAN in Kiew. It will end asap, but never ever will it end with an Ukrainian victory. Both sides will fail and compromise will be the result.

If Ukraine wins that would also be a victory for those millions of Ukrainians who celebrate their streets and monuments named after pro-Nazi antisemites like Jaroslav Stetsko. Is this what Bernard-Henri Lévy and Tablet Magazine, NATO and German warmongers truly want, deep in their hearts?

About the Author

Dr Clemens Heni is director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

A response to Bernard-Henri Lévy

von admin

am November 22, 2015

in Allgemein

By Leslie S. Lebl, Connecticut, USA

On November 16, 2015, French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy published a commentary in which he urges the West to acknowledge that it is at war and must call things by their right names. He subsequently argues that we must battle Islamic jihad while understanding the difference between those Muslims who worship death and those who support a peaceful, tolerant form of Islam.

It is difficult to quarrel with this concept, especially when one remembers that by far the largest number of people who have died fighting various jihadist groups have been Muslims. But, as in so many other cases, “the devil is in the detail.” Lévy’s argument suffers by failing to acknowledge or understand some of the “details.”

Distinguishing ‘moderate’ from ‘radical’ Muslims sounds easy, until you try it. For example, Lévy includes former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović among the moderates. Yet Izetbegović’s famous Islamic Declaration (1970) presents a vision of Islamic triumph completely consistent with the Islamist goal of imposing traditional Islamic law, or sharia, in Western countries. It argues that Muslims living in a non-Muslim majority country should play by the rules of that country—until they are strong enough to overthrow the system and install an Islamic government. The Declaration has been dismissed as a youthful folly, yet Izetbegović distributed it to Bosniac troops during the 1990s war, suggesting that it still reflected his thinking – as did other actions promoting Islamism and jihad taken while he was in office.[i]

A number of people, including Adolf Hitler, perceived similarities between Islam and Nazism, but it does not help to charge that Nazism is a form of Islamism, as does Lévy while citing French poet, dramatist and diplomat Paul Claudel, a well known Catholic at the time. This trivializes Nazism as just another form of Islamism. From a historical perspective, this is an extremely difficult argument to make, in view of all the other sources of Nazism much closer to home. Nor does it help promote understanding in today’s world, where the word “fascism” is tossed about with abandon. Applying it to the terrorist groups attacking the West does little to focus our thinking. Nor does Levy’s explanation address the much more pressing and painful fact that Islamism has, since World War II, poisoned the Muslim world with its genocidal hatred of Jews, the Jewish state of Israel and the Western way of life. Today, Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and Protocols of the Elders of Zion are available in just about any bookstore, and stories like those told by Robert Satloff of Arabs saving Jews during World War II appear hopelessly remote.[ii] Yes, Arabs in the Middle East can argue that they had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but they cannot simultaneously proclaim their admiration for Nazism while claiming moral superiority.

Lévy is also wrong when he states that the “real source of this flood of horror” is the Islamic State. Islamic State may have carried out the latest attacks, and be our most significant threat right now, but it is only following in the well-established tradition of other groups like Al Qaeda and the Algerian GIS. Nor is it the bloodiest or most murderous group today: that honor belongs rather to Boko Haram.

The problem is not the group but the ideology, which all these terrorist organizations share with the so-called “nonviolent” Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, whom Lévy seems to ignore. All of them want to establish a global Caliphate under sharia, but the “nonviolent” groups believe it is easier and more efficacious to do so without violence. Former U.S. President George W. Bush was indeed wrong to declare a “War on Terror” when what threatens the West is not a tactic but an ideology. Banning hate preachers is fine but will achieve little as long as groups like the Brotherhood, posing as friends of Western democracy, laws and values, in fact act as a Fifth Column (as did Nazi groups, as Lévy notes). Recent events in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere have revealed the Brotherhood’s true face, but Lévy seems to ignore these revelations. Unfortunately, however, the Brotherhood’s presence throughout Western Muslim communities, and its ability to poison traditional Islam, make the problem of isolating our true enemies much more difficult than Lévy imagines.

[i] For more details, see Leslie S. Lebl, Islamism and Security in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Strategic Studies Institute, May 2014, pp. 20–26.

[ii] Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).

Leslie S. Lebl, a former US diplomat, is an independent scholar writing on Islamism in Europe. She is currently working on a book about the EU, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation