Leon Uris
09-17-2003, 12:27 PM
This is from the Jerusalem Report. An excellent article on the virulent anti-semitism that is rife in Pakistan.
A must read for all Jews as Pakistan is the only islamic nation that has nukes.
Comments in squigly brackets {}inserted by me.
http://www.jrep.com/UpFront/Article-5.html
Up Front: Daniel Pearl’s Defender
Netty C. Gross
It was clear something important was taking place inside the Hebrew University’s packed Mexico auditorium on May 18 when university vice president Moshe Arad and his wife were initially barred from entering by security guards; there was no room.
The occasion was a lecture by French icon Bernard-Henri Levy, the 54-year-old Algerian-born Jewish writer, philosopher, filmmaker and activist who is lionized in France, where intellectuals are celebrities. A critic of the French left and right, and a Zionist, Levy has his share of enemies. BHL (as he’s known at home) is also handsome, rich (the wealth is inherited from his late father André’s lumber business) and, after years of glorying in being a self-professed "libertine," has been married since 1993 to glamorous, non-Jewish French actress-singer Arielle Dombasle.
But today’s appearance is all work, no play. BHL jetted in earlier in the day from Morocco (where he owns an 18th-century palace) to be hosted by the Hebrew University and talk about the recent publication of his latest bestseller, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" a 537-page investigation into the brutal murder of the 38-year-old Wall Street Journal journalist last year in Pakistan.
In an earlier press conference, Levy told journalists that Pearl had three strikes against him, each of which could have caused his kidnapping and murder in a country where, "being Jewish is not an identity, it’s a crime; being an American is the embodiment of evil; and being a journalist is to be an agent for the Mossad or CIA." But Levy believes that Pearl was killed, in fact, by Pakistan’s secret service. Pearl was about to expose a link between government-employed Pakistani nuclear physicists, themselves Islamic fundamentalist "holy warriors of the earth" who believe "the bomb belongs to the whole Islamic nation," and Al-Qaeda.
In recent years, BHL has written about conflicts in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bosnia and Afghanistan. But nothing, he says at the press conference, quite matches up to what is happening in Pakistan these days, where he spent a year researching the Pearl story, with visits to other Muslim countries. Far worse than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it’s a "land of evil," a "state of apocalypse," where Islamic fundamentalists happily hawk videotapes of Pearl’s torture, humiliation ("I am a Jew, my father is a Jew...") and decapitation, outside religious schools; where despite the complete absence of Jews, the anti-Semitism is so rabid that he found himself becoming physically ill after listening to the vituperations of a top police commander . {Actually, the presence of jews is not necessary for muslims to be anti-semitic because islam itself is virulently anti-semitic as evidenced by the butchery and rape perpetrated by mohammad upon jews}
Levy also analyzed the motives of Pearl’s murderer, Omar Sheik, a wealthy, Western-educated Pakistani turned fanatic. He tries to understand what happened to "these natural children of the Occident and Islam." His conclusion is beyond grim. Islamic fundamentalist terror, said Levy, is not a movement springing from post-colonial poverty. Rather, it’s a worldwide criminal enterprise, a billion-dollar mafia run by a tight politburo of power-crazed, sex-obsessed, fundamentalist gangsters ("their libido for dominance is greater than any Koranic desire"), who make their money, among other ways, trafficking in "drugs, girls, virgins"; who run "kamikaze factories" in Pakistan and send agents to negotiate with parents for their sons and daughters to become suicide bombers. "We’re looking at an utterly sordid madness, an economy of death," he says, which stretches from Dubai to Karachi where it is headquartered.
But BHL’s book is also an emotional odyssey into the life of Pearl -- he calls him Danny -- with whom Levy felt a deep kinship. Like himself, Levy says in his Hebrew U. lecture, Pearl was a universalist, a "citizen of the world," married to a non-Jew. The book, he says, was a "paper tombstone for this posthumous friend." Levy says he was in Kabul, in the office of Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, when he learned of Pearl’s fate. Karzai received notification and turned pale; BHL immediately flew to Pakistan where he found the cassette of Pearl’s murder for sale and tried to imagine the "fanatic, holding the video camera" and filming Pearl’s final agonies, "later showing it as a trophy at the mosque." He compares this to the Nazi soldiers who sent home postcards to loved ones in Germany showing how they’d tortured terrorized Jews.
"All in the name of God. What greater horror could there be? A Jewish beheading in the 21st century? I knew I was facing a significant event," an affair that revealed "the very heart of modern anti-Semitism."
Levy says Pearl in his final moments actually foiled the executioners’ determination to humiliate him. In the full tape of the terrible scene, Levy says Pearl "confesses" that he is a grandson of "the Zionist Chaim Pearl" and mentions that there is a street named for him in Bnei Brak. "Why did he go out of his way to mention Bnei Brak?" asked Levy. "Because he wanted to say, I belong to a family which built a beautiful Israel and an advancing civilization, while you are wicked barbarians."
Levy has been sharply critical of Israel’s settlement policies -- he interrupted the Pearl book after Operation Defensive Shield began last April and flew to Jenin to investigate charges of a massacre. He later defended Israel in the French media against those charges. "I feel Israel’s pain, its isolation," he says. Much as he feels Daniel Pearl’s pain, personally.
Netty C. Gross
A must read for all Jews as Pakistan is the only islamic nation that has nukes.
Comments in squigly brackets {}inserted by me.
http://www.jrep.com/UpFront/Article-5.html
Up Front: Daniel Pearl’s Defender
Netty C. Gross
It was clear something important was taking place inside the Hebrew University’s packed Mexico auditorium on May 18 when university vice president Moshe Arad and his wife were initially barred from entering by security guards; there was no room.
The occasion was a lecture by French icon Bernard-Henri Levy, the 54-year-old Algerian-born Jewish writer, philosopher, filmmaker and activist who is lionized in France, where intellectuals are celebrities. A critic of the French left and right, and a Zionist, Levy has his share of enemies. BHL (as he’s known at home) is also handsome, rich (the wealth is inherited from his late father André’s lumber business) and, after years of glorying in being a self-professed "libertine," has been married since 1993 to glamorous, non-Jewish French actress-singer Arielle Dombasle.
But today’s appearance is all work, no play. BHL jetted in earlier in the day from Morocco (where he owns an 18th-century palace) to be hosted by the Hebrew University and talk about the recent publication of his latest bestseller, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" a 537-page investigation into the brutal murder of the 38-year-old Wall Street Journal journalist last year in Pakistan.
In an earlier press conference, Levy told journalists that Pearl had three strikes against him, each of which could have caused his kidnapping and murder in a country where, "being Jewish is not an identity, it’s a crime; being an American is the embodiment of evil; and being a journalist is to be an agent for the Mossad or CIA." But Levy believes that Pearl was killed, in fact, by Pakistan’s secret service. Pearl was about to expose a link between government-employed Pakistani nuclear physicists, themselves Islamic fundamentalist "holy warriors of the earth" who believe "the bomb belongs to the whole Islamic nation," and Al-Qaeda.
In recent years, BHL has written about conflicts in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bosnia and Afghanistan. But nothing, he says at the press conference, quite matches up to what is happening in Pakistan these days, where he spent a year researching the Pearl story, with visits to other Muslim countries. Far worse than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it’s a "land of evil," a "state of apocalypse," where Islamic fundamentalists happily hawk videotapes of Pearl’s torture, humiliation ("I am a Jew, my father is a Jew...") and decapitation, outside religious schools; where despite the complete absence of Jews, the anti-Semitism is so rabid that he found himself becoming physically ill after listening to the vituperations of a top police commander . {Actually, the presence of jews is not necessary for muslims to be anti-semitic because islam itself is virulently anti-semitic as evidenced by the butchery and rape perpetrated by mohammad upon jews}
Levy also analyzed the motives of Pearl’s murderer, Omar Sheik, a wealthy, Western-educated Pakistani turned fanatic. He tries to understand what happened to "these natural children of the Occident and Islam." His conclusion is beyond grim. Islamic fundamentalist terror, said Levy, is not a movement springing from post-colonial poverty. Rather, it’s a worldwide criminal enterprise, a billion-dollar mafia run by a tight politburo of power-crazed, sex-obsessed, fundamentalist gangsters ("their libido for dominance is greater than any Koranic desire"), who make their money, among other ways, trafficking in "drugs, girls, virgins"; who run "kamikaze factories" in Pakistan and send agents to negotiate with parents for their sons and daughters to become suicide bombers. "We’re looking at an utterly sordid madness, an economy of death," he says, which stretches from Dubai to Karachi where it is headquartered.
But BHL’s book is also an emotional odyssey into the life of Pearl -- he calls him Danny -- with whom Levy felt a deep kinship. Like himself, Levy says in his Hebrew U. lecture, Pearl was a universalist, a "citizen of the world," married to a non-Jew. The book, he says, was a "paper tombstone for this posthumous friend." Levy says he was in Kabul, in the office of Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, when he learned of Pearl’s fate. Karzai received notification and turned pale; BHL immediately flew to Pakistan where he found the cassette of Pearl’s murder for sale and tried to imagine the "fanatic, holding the video camera" and filming Pearl’s final agonies, "later showing it as a trophy at the mosque." He compares this to the Nazi soldiers who sent home postcards to loved ones in Germany showing how they’d tortured terrorized Jews.
"All in the name of God. What greater horror could there be? A Jewish beheading in the 21st century? I knew I was facing a significant event," an affair that revealed "the very heart of modern anti-Semitism."
Levy says Pearl in his final moments actually foiled the executioners’ determination to humiliate him. In the full tape of the terrible scene, Levy says Pearl "confesses" that he is a grandson of "the Zionist Chaim Pearl" and mentions that there is a street named for him in Bnei Brak. "Why did he go out of his way to mention Bnei Brak?" asked Levy. "Because he wanted to say, I belong to a family which built a beautiful Israel and an advancing civilization, while you are wicked barbarians."
Levy has been sharply critical of Israel’s settlement policies -- he interrupted the Pearl book after Operation Defensive Shield began last April and flew to Jenin to investigate charges of a massacre. He later defended Israel in the French media against those charges. "I feel Israel’s pain, its isolation," he says. Much as he feels Daniel Pearl’s pain, personally.
Netty C. Gross