Tel-Chai Nation

Author Henri-Levi was interviewed about the terrible situation today involving Islamic terrorism:

Faces don’t get much more expressive than Bernard-Henri Lévy’s. The thick eyebrows go up and down, powered variously by rage, incredulity and sadness; the lips purse, pout and curl with derision. But when the 75-year-old French philosopher describes the scene at what was left of the Kfar Aza kibbutz in southern Israel on October 10 last year, his face empties of all expression.

“The bodies of the victims had been buried by that point, but there were still pieces of bodies that hadn’t been assigned yet,” he tells me. “They were stacked in a corner of a vegetable shed that was being used to house unidentified body parts. And that image?” He shakes his head. “There is not a day or a night when I do not see it in my head. It follows me around constantly.”

“I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my life,” stresses the Algerian-born war reporter and documentary-maker, in reference to the many war-torn lands he has visited over the past 40 years – from Bosnia, where he highlighted the concentration camps, to Afghanistan, where he was a French envoy in the aftermath of the war; from Libya, where Lévy met the rebels fighting against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime to Syria, Kurdistan, Nigeria and Rwanda.

“At 23, I remember seeing a group of Pakistani officers [in a Pakistani-controlled area of Bangladesh during the third India-Pakistan war] playing cards as one fellow officer’s disembowelled corpses lay rotting 10 metres away.” He tilts his head to one side, sighs. “So deaths, and deaths of the kind no man or woman should ever see, I’ve seen a lot of them. But what I saw in that little vegetable shed, where body parts were on hold, where this debris of humanity had been put, which had once belonged to souls, to lives – but had been reduced to bits? That had a terrible effect on me.”

[...] Traces of that levity were still there on our last meeting, in 2021, even if the subject matter we were discussing – a new book called The Will To See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope – was sombre. But today frivolity is notably absent for two obvious reasons.

The first is Lévy’s loss of liberty. I’m aware that for the past year, the “rockstar” philosopher has been living in an undisclosed location under very heavy police protection, after intelligence officials discovered that a unit of the Quds Force – the special operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – had paid an Iranian drug dealer $150,000 to assassinate Lévy, who has been critical of the country’s leadership. This will take its toll on anyone, let alone a man as sociable as he is, a man I know loves to wander around the streets of Paris and London.

Out of prudence, however, he refuses to talk to me about the implications this has on his family: his actress and singer wife of 31 years, Arielle Dombasle; his two children, bestselling novelist Justine, 50 (from his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne) and lawyer Anthonin, 43 (from his second, to Sylvie Bouscasse). And although his personal life has always been complicated (Lévy had a long on-and-off relationship with the aristocratic artist, Daphne Guinness), this can’t have made things any easier.

It's definitely very sad this has happened.

Labels: anti-semitism, dhimmitude, France, islam, Israel, jihad, military, misogyny, Moonbattery, political corruption, racism, sexual violence, terrorism, war on terror