In his latest essay at The Daily Beast, M. Lévy pronounces, not on the danger of populist Le Pen, but on the danger of Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Perhaps pronounces is the wrong descriptor. M. Lévy’s essay reads as if it were to be declaimed before the masses, like he did for those assembled for ‘Ukraine: Thinking Together’ Kyiv, 15-19 May 2014. The reader is confronted with statements, and the spaces left for the interruptions of applause, after each revelatory comment: the delivery of his moral exhortations is everything, they must have room to breathe. Applause is the indispensable garnish to this generation’s political dinosaur, the intellectuel engagé.
M. Lévy finds the perfect home at The Daily Beast, as Neo-Conservative Michael Weiss is his natural ally. Tina Brown published Lévy as part of dressing up her gossip sheet as somehow serious, respectable journalism. Weiss and Lévy are political fellow travelers. Note also that Le Pen has ‘courted’ Jews:
Headline: France’s Far Right, Once Known for Anti-Semitism, Courts Jews
PARIS — For years, France’s far-right National Front was synonymous with anti-Semitism. Its founder, Jean Marie Le Pen, was notorious for anti-Semitic outbursts — including a comment that the Holocaust was just a detail of history.
But since Mr. Le Pen’s daughter Marine took over the party’s leadership in 2011, the National Front has attempted a remarkable about-face: Today, the party positions itself as a champion of French Jews.
Although Ms. Le Pen, one of the front-runners in the coming presidential election, still alludes to anti-Semitic stereotypes on the campaign trail, she now promises that her party will be the protector of French Jews.
It is a surprising twist that has resonated with some French Jews who feel abandoned by what they see as the government’s tepid response to the anti-Semitic violence that has plagued the country for years.
Is it that in the ‘West’ now governed by Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and its various permutations and intellectual successors, that the Jew is the known ‘other’? While Islam and its followers, and their politically radicalized faction, now constitute that ‘other’ that is now cast as the villains to be feared, hated, inveighed and warred against? Even as they are part of our communities and the shared Abrahamic Tradition.
The reader can count on many things from M. Lévy, his inexhaustible pretentious verbosity is ever-present !
Committed Observer
Added April 16,2017:
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