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Last week I almost got on a plane to Paris in order to continue the good work of my Belgian friend. But in the end I got lazy and went skiing instead. In any case, there is no pie big enough to make the bum BHL mend his wicked ways. Here’s his latest outrage: Stéphane Hessel is a German-born Jew whose father emigrated to France in 1924, when Stéphane was seven. His father was the model for one of the two lovers in Jules et Jim, the novel which later became a very popular film. Stéphane served in the French army, became a prisoner of war, escaped and joined de Gaulle. Dispatched to France to organise resistance he was captured, tortured and sent to Buchenwald. While being sent to Bergen-Belsen he escaped yet again.
After the war he was named ambassador and worked with the UN. Honours and awards followed. Late last year, in his 93rd year, he published his book Be Indignant!, his defence of Palestinians under brutal Israeli occupation. The book became an overnight bestseller — 600,000 in two months. (Charles Glass Books has just landed the UK rights and will publish it shortly.)
Now this is the man whose alma mater, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, invited to speak to the students when a pro-Israeli website objected. In comes our hero, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the multimillionaire son of an Algerian timber tycoon, and one whose father I am sure never donned a military uniform for France or any other country. Lévy objected virulently to Hessel’s invitation and the 93-year-old was silenced.
Well, I am not. I have met the self-publicist and self-proclaimed philosopher once, and it was not pleasant. His trademark open white shirt to his navel was there for all to see — in the French Embassy, of all places — and a blonde I used to step out with who is his present squeeze introduced us. He tried to stare me down, like bullies do in sleazy clubs, but it didn’t work. I know how to handle phonies, and he’s as phony as they come.
There are those, mind you, who take Lévy seriously — French image-makers, PR hucksters and other such modern pests — but serious people do not. As a historian BHL has offered a very dark picture of French history in an attempt to draw attention to himself as an independent thinker. He is nothing of the kind, and has never come up with a single philosophical proposition. In fact, he has been caught out in his refutation of Kant in which he quoted ‘the famous French philosopher Botul’, a spoof perpetrated by a journalist who’d had enough of BHL’s pomposity and phoniness.
Although I regret not having shoved a pie in his face, or a knuckle sandwich for that matter, what he did to the Pearl family deserved much more than lemon pies. BHL wrote a very bad book about Daniel Pearl’s murder, but fictionalised it to the extent that Pearl’s widow and family were outraged, accusing Levy’s ego of getting in the way of the truth. BHL’s methods are vile and, in the case of Israeli outrages against unarmed Palestinians, downright disgusting. No outrage by Israeli Zionists has ever caught his attention, but the moment the 93-year-old Hessel’s name came up, there was BHL, peacock-like, denouncing a fellow Jew who fought for his adopted country against the Nazis and suffered as a result.
Such are the joys of modern celebrities posing as hommes sérieux. BHL is a boaster and an imposter, a shameless publicity freak who has given philosophy a bad smell. We need to bake more pies. Better yet, knuckle sandwiches.
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