Bernard-Henri Lévy
WSJ, Nov. 14, 2024
“What happens now when they are told, “You have the right to be protected, but only if you aren’t openly or excessively Zionist”?”
The University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. Two prestigious institutions where the spirit of antisemitic hatred has been raging in the U.S. since Oct. 7, 2023. These students claim to follow French theory and Michel Foucault. Well, I am here to talk to them about the Foucault I knew: the one who had just returned from California and who, in 1975, was among the first, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, to protest the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism.
Los Angeles is the first stop on my 10-day campus tour of North America, which I announced on these pages last month. Next is the Claremont Colleges, where a group of woke activists are outraged that the author of “Israel Alone” is invited. It’s a double occasion: A Holocaust studies professor has invited me to guest-teach her seminar, and there’s a meeting where I urge students not to succumb to intimidation: “Israel, this multiethnic and multireligious democracy that has endured 75 years of war without falling into the abyss of the state of emergency, can and should be defended—not in spite of but because of your progressive beliefs.”
Election night at Stanford, where French philosophers Michel Serres and René Girard once taught. A giant screen behind me, muted. The students’ eyes I see tell me all I need to know as the map turns red. By midnight, it’s over: These young liberal Jews know they will now have, as an ally, a president with whom they share almost nothing.
A stop in Vancouver, then Toronto, where Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur who relentlessly accuses Israel of “genocide,” is scheduled to speak. I don’t want her to have the last word, but her supporters seem equally determined not to let me have a word at all. That is why my address takes place in a heavily secured basement auditorium, guarded by student leaders worried about an incident. I say that I know from experience what a genocidal project is—Bangladesh, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Ukraine. An army that, just this morning, coordinated the transfer of 231 Gazan children with rare diseases to Emirati hospitals obviously has nothing to do with genocide. … [To read the full article, click here]