Washington Post: Boycotting Israel Is Not Anti-Semitism

…by Jonas E. Alexis

The debate is now over. The Washington Post itself says it: boycotting Israel is perfectly legitimate and has nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Semitism. Israel, the Post has recently added,

“has violated international law by occupying the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The boycott movement is a nonviolent effort to show opposition to this occupation, similar, its advocates argue, to the sanctions movement against South Africa to show opposition to apartheid. Hatred of Judaism or Jews, which is what constitutes anti-Semitism, appears to be absent from these boycott efforts.

“Only by redefining ‘anti-Semitism’ to mean criticism of Israel can such a charge be sustained. Israel’s policies in the occupied territories should be debated on their merits, and defenders of the occupation should not hide behind false charges of ‘anti-Semitism.’”[1]

Perhaps the Jewish writer who made those statements in the Washington Post should subscribe to VT, for we have been saying for a long time that Netanyahu and his GOP puppets and neoconservative flagships such as Commentary ought to be dismissed when they preposterously declare that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.[2]

We also have been saying that people like Bernard-Henry Levy need to be dismissed. Levy, whose greatest intellectual achievement was to destroy countries that he does not like (most specifically Libya),[3] is an impostor. Here is the genius of the so-called philosopher.

Last April, he wrote an article in the Huffington Post entitled “In Praise of Blasphemy,” in which he incoherently argued that, among other things, “Charlie Hebdo was and is more respectful to Muslims than the idiots who think they are honoring Islam by killing.”[4]

Yet in the same month, Levy the philosopher could not stand Marine le Pen and her father![5] What was the cause of the fury? Le Pen said that “The gas chambers were a detail of the war, unless we admit that the war was a detail of the gas chambers!”[6] To Levy, that seems to be an unpardonable sin.

Last year, Levy even went further saying that Dieudonné M’bala M’bala and Alain Soral have espoused hatred of Jews and “rationalization of crimes against humanity” and therefore must be banned and preferably jailed. Dieudonne’s demonstrations, says Levy, are not opinions “but crimes.”[7]

Now get this. When Jewish director and filmmaker Roman Polanski was accused of using drugs to rape and sodomize a 13-year old girl by the name of Samantha Gailey in 1977,[8] Levy thought that it would have been immoral to place Polanski behind bars because Polanski, said Levy, had already suffered enough as a “Holocaust survivor.”

Once again, when the notorious IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of raping a hotel employee (forensic evidence such as semen sample was found on the woman’s shirt[9]), Levy, like the New York Times,[10] defended his brother from another mother.[11]

Both Levy and the New York Times never discussed Strauss-Kahn’s long history of “aggravated pimping,” prostitution and “recreational orgies,” and even “beast-like sex parties”[12] in France, Belgium and the United States.[13] The Daily Mail reported that Strauss-Kahn

“admitted that the orgies took place, but denied knowing the women were paid to be there, saying he believed they were simply ‘libertine’…[Strauss-Kahn] took part in the orgies as ‘recreations sessions’, away from his job ‘saving the world’ as the head of the IMF.

“Two of the women involved in the parties recounted during the trial how Strauss-Kahn took part in ‘brutal’ sex sessions, claiming he often had sex with them against their will. ‘I was shocked – I didn’t want to get involved in this carnage,’ one call girl told police in an interview submitted by prosecutors as part of the vast evidence bundle.

“Other witnesses at the orgies described DSK in the height of ‘pure sexual consummation’, with women all over his writhing body. Strauss Kahn admitted that he has ‘a sexuality which, compared to average men, is more rough’, but added ‘women have the right not to like that whether they are prostitutes or not.’”[14]

In 2003, a 32-year old journalist and writer by the name of Tristane Banon said that Strauss-Kahn “tried to unhook her bra and open her jeans.”[15] How did Levy and the New York Times get the courage to support a man like that? Well, in the Zionist universe, nothing is impossible. All you need is a will to act. As Gilad Atzmon put it back in 2009, this is “an exceptional example of lame Jewish logic.”

So, the logic is pretty clear here: Levy is asking for the right to blaspheme Islam, Putin and Russia,[16] and anything that he does not like, but Marine le Pen, Dieudonne, among others, do not have the right to blaspheme ideas that Levy does not like. How can this man profess to be a philosopher and espouse this dumb idea simultaneously? How is it that his head does not explode into different particles? Is this the kind of logic that he learned from Jewish revolutionary Jacques Derrida and French Communist Louis Althusser?

In 2008, Levy wrote in The American Interest:

“The new political anti-Semitism is in Europe, the Muslim world, much of Asia, and even in the New World.”[17]

Come on, Levy. I think you can do better than that.

Levy’s intellectual deterioration seems to have no limit. He once argued that Heinrich Himmler stood trial at Nuremberg![18] This idea was dumb that it was quickly dismissed by French Jewish historian Pierre Vidal-Nacquet.[19] Levy’s “intellectual dishonesty,” says Vidal-Nacquet, “is properly unfathomable.” Not only that, Levy denounced Emmanuel Kant as a madman.[20]

What we are seeing here is that Levy is not really using the intellectual patrimony of the West but is allying himself with the revolutionary spirit of his brethren. In the 1960s, Levy himself declared that he was “aligned with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movement of the time, but in my own ways…”[21]

This indeed is an infallible sign that Levy is following the Talmudic ideology, which has wreaked havoc in the West from time immemorial. “The Talmud is democracy in practice,” Levy wrote. “The Jewish nation invented the notion that truth lies in the heated argument.”[22]

Balderdash.

The Boston Globe declared that Levy is “perhaps the most prominent intellectual in France today.” If that is true, then the education system in France has gone down the tube. It is like having Alan Dershowitz at Harvard.

[1] “Boycotting Israel Is Not Anti-Semitism,” Washington Post, June 15, 2015.

[2] Jonathan S. Tobin, “Contentions: Anti-Zionism Always Equals Anti-Semitism,” Commentary, August 18, 2014; see also Steven Bayme, “Does Anti-Zionism Equal Anti-Semitism?,” Daily Beast, October 22, 2012; Donna Carol Voss, “Anti-Semitism Is Pissing on My Boots and Telling Me It’s Anti-Zionism,” The Blaze, March 12, 2015; Rick Moran, “Is there a difference between ‘anti-Zionism’ and ‘anti-Semitism’?,” American Thinker, August 7, 2014.

[3] Bernard-Henry Levy, “Have I Become an Undesirable in Libya?,” Daily Beast, March 27, 2013.

[4] Bernard-Henry Levy, “In Praise of Blasphemy,” Huffington Post, April 30, 2015.

[5] Bernard-Henry Levy, “Le Pen and Le Pen, Enough, Already!,” Huffington Post, April 15, 2015.

[6] “Founder of French extreme-right party defends having described Nazi gas chambers as a ‘detail of history,’” European Jewish Press, April 4, 2015.

[7] Bernard-Henry Levy, “Anti-Semitism in France, the Responsibility to Protect, Timorous Europe, and Obama’s New Isolationism,” Huffington Post, January 5, 2015.

[8] “The slow-burning Polanski saga,” BBC, September 28, 2009.

[9] “Dominique Strauss-Kahn DNA ‘linked to maid,’” BBC, May 24, 2011.

[10] Jim Dwyer, William K. Rashbaum, and John Eligon, “Strauss-Kahn Prosecution Said to Be Near Collapse,” NY Times, June 30, 2011.

[11] Bernard-Henry Levy, “Bernard-Henri Lévy Defends Accused IMF Director,” Daily Beast, May 16, 2011.

[12] Chris Pleasance, “Disgraced former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn CLEARED of aggravated pimping for ‘recreational’ orgies during global financial crisis,” Daily Mail, June 12, 2015.

[13] “Dominique Strauss-Kahn acquitted of ‘aggravated pimping,’” BBC, June 12, 2015.

[14] Chris Pleasance, “Disgraced former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn CLEARED of aggravated pimping for ‘recreational’ orgies during global financial crisis,” Daily Mail, June 12, 2015.

[15] Henry Samuel, “Dominique Strauss-Kahn Facing Second Sex Charge,” The Telegraph, July 4, 2011; Kim Willsher, “Dominique Strauss-Kahn to face fresh sex assault complaint,” Guardian, May 16, 2011.

[16] Bernard-Henry Levy, “Bernard-Henri Levy: Ukraine’s Revolutionaries Are Not Fascists,” Daily Beast, February 26, 2014.

[17] Henry-Bernard Levy, “The Task of the Jews,” American Interest, September/October 2008.

[18] Gary Wood, “Je Suis un Superstar,” Guardian, June 15, 2003.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Doreen Carvajal, “Philosopher Left to Muse on Ridicule over Hoax,” NY Times, February 9, 2010.

[21] Gary Wood, “Je Suis un Superstar,” Guardian, June 15, 2003.

[22] Quoted in Attila Somfalvi, “Bernard-Henri Levy: Israel Secular Miracle,” Y-Net News, May 31, 2010.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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