“So I’m anti-anti-American because if we let this anti-Americanism flow, it will spark off a disastrous fascism.” ~Bernard-Henri Levy 

The only thing more annoying that the drivel that BHL has to offer is the sense of admiration one gets from Mr. Heath, the Spectator interviewer.  “Yes, tell me more about Islamic fascism, Bernard,” you can hear him sigh with delight.  And BHL does go on and on about it:

The founders of Islamism read the European thinkers who said that democracy was not a universal value, that relativism was a law of humanity, that America was a nightmare, that the French Revolution was something that had to be forgotten, that the German theory of the good communitarian nation, well rooted in the earth of an organic society, is better than the abstract Franco-American definition of a community of citizens.

Is this supposed to convince us of the “fascist” nature of “Islamism”?  Because it isn’t working.  Democracy isn’t a value at all.  It’s a form of government.  And it isn’t universal.  This is not an argument that fascists made up.  It has been a statement of the blindingly obvious.  I don’t accept that relativism is a law of humanity (which “European thinkers” exactly are making big waves in jihadi reading circles, past or present?), unless by this BHL actually means that some types of regimes are better suited for different nations according to their history and culture than others.  Of course I don’t agree that America is a “nightmare,” though it is frightening that we seem to have a large number of people in the conservative “movement” who utter the same kinds of inanities as BHL and receive praise for it.  If only the French Revolution could be forgotten for all time, its legacy banished to the netherworld BHL says this as if it were some sort of reproach against these people that they would read things that say this.  Of course he would think this, but why should anyone reading The Spectator take it seriously?  If a Muslim read Burke he would come away with the impression that the Revolution was a disaster–which it was–and he would probably draw comparisons between what the Jacobins were doing to France and what neo-Jacobins are attempting to do to certain Muslim nations today.  He might even be inclined to view these attempts negatively, and no wonder.  Yet somehow I doubt that Bin Laden is poring over his copy of Reflections on the Revolution in France.  A nation rooted in organic society is better than an abstract definition of a community, though it is the self-serving story of ideologues to convince us that the American and French nations are abstractly defined communities bound by “values” and political principles.  What Spectator reader would seriously argue otherwise? 

BHL is France’s answer to Andrew Sullivan, only with a lot more hair.  Where Sullivan sees galivanting religious extremism everywhere (and I do mean everywhere), BHL sees the explosion of fascism and anti-Americanism–the latter just being another form of fascism–which he happily defines to fit whatever it is he wants to talk about.  They have a talent, such as it is, for throwing everything they don’t like in the world into a blender and coming up with their overly broad, incredible definition of the political foe.  It must be terribly fun to be a “public intellectual” of this stripe: take a limited, specific phenomenon, exaggerate its influence and importance, conflate it with everything under the sun, declare it to be the enemy of all things good and true and then announce to the world that the maniacs are on the loose and are coming to take us all away to V for Vendetta-style prisons where the poor Qur’an-quoting homosexuals and the officially non-fascist quislings of hegemonism will be thrown by the anti-Amerislamofascists.  If BHL is anti-anti-American, sign me up for anti-anti-anti-Americanism.