The second book about the murder, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (or BHL as he is known in Parisian gossip columns), is a more ambitious work, with pretensions to both original investigative journalism and novelistic prose; but it is deeply flawed, riddled with major factual errors, and in every way a lesser book than Mariane Pearl's.

Although attempting to create a new literary form—what Lévy calls a romanquête—mixing reportage with John Berendt– or Truman Capote–like novelization, it is apparent from its opening pages that with Pakistan Lévy is way out of his depth. Who Killed Daniel Pearl? does, however, raise issues of great importance, for all that much of it is invented and its political analysis ill-informed and simplistic.

The book's principal problem is the amateurish quality of much of Lévy's research. The section on the English childhood of Omar Sheikh begins raising one's doubts about the author's veracity: Omar Sheikh's family live, we are told, on Colvin Street, which does not exist on the London A–Z street atlas. Once we arrive in Pakistan the factual underpinnings of the book fall away. BHL's grasp of South Asian geography is especially shaky: he thinks Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-held Kashmir (and the major jihadi center on Pakistani soil), is in India. The madrasa, or religious school, of Akora Khattack, not far from the Indus, he thinks is in Peshawar (it is more than eighty miles outside), while the town of Saharanpur, four hours' drive from the Indian capital, is said to be a remote part of Delhi.

More importantly, Lévy quickly shows that he is deeply ignorant of South Asian politics. Abdul Ghani Lone, the leading Kashmiri moderate, assassinated on May 21, 2002, almost certainly by ISI-backed Islamists for being willing to reach a democratic settlement with India, is said to be "notorious" and his presence in a hotel in Rawalpindi proof of its links to the darker side of Pakistani intelligence. His party, the Hurriyat, now the main force for compromise in Kashmir, is elsewhere mistakenly described as a fundamentalist Islamic NGO. Gossip and hearsay are repeated as fact: bin Laden, we learn, went to Peshawar to have medical treatment after the bombing of Tora Bora. A few pages later, bin Laden is said to have been given shelter in a madrasa in Karachi. This of course would be a major scoop if true, for Lévy would have solved a problem that has eluded the combined resources of every Western intelligence agency: how bin Laden was nursed to fitness under the noses of the Pakistani military. But no source is quoted, no evidence presented. It's just a throwaway remark.

More seriously, there are numerous occasions where Lévy distorts his evidence and actually inverts the truth. While seeking to prove that the ISI and al-Qaeda were jointly responsible for abducting Daniel Pearl, for example, he cites three precedents in which journalists were "kidnapped in Pakistan by ISI agents suspected of being backed up by al-Qaida." In reality, in two of the cases he cites—Najam Sethi and Hussain Haqqani—both were arrested by the regular Punjab police as part of a campaign by Pakistan's last civilian prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to intimidate the press. The case of the third journalist, Ghulam Hasnain, remains a mystery: he was picked up for a day and then released. He has never identified the agency that arrested him; but no connection has ever been shown—or, up to now, even suggested —with al-Qaeda. Lévy's misuse of evidence here is revealing of his general method: if proof does not exist, he writes as if it did. The ISI has been involved in many dubious activities, but there has never been any suggestion that it has abducted Westerners, least of all an American. This record is important evidence against any direct link between the ISI and Pearl's abduction rather than the reverse.

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Toward the end of the book, Lévy presents a series of elaborate and unprovable conspiracy theories. He claims that Omar Sheikh got ISI money and used it to help finance the September 11 attack. He cites an article Pearl wrote with Steven LeVine for The Wall Street Journal saying that a former director of the ISI may have been involved in giving information about nuclear weapons to Osama bin Laden and others in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Pearl, he goes on to conjecture, continued to pursue this story, and may have stumbled across important new evidence. For this reason, he says, the ISI had him murdered. Pearl's employer, The Wall Street Journal, and his colleagues there have made it clear that, contrary to Lévy's speculations, they have no evidence that Pearl was continuing to work on any such story, while Pearl's father told the Los An-geles Times that Lévy's hypothesis "doesn't jell with the facts."[2]

Throughout his book Lévy shows an intermittent disdain for Islam, and something approaching hatred for Pakistan. He rightly criticizes Paki-stanis for their anti-Semitism, and for regarding Israel as evil incarnate, but then goes on to use the same prejudiced language about Pakistan. It is "the Devil's own home," "drugged on fanaticism, doped on violence," a "silent hell, full of the living damned" and their "nightmare mullahs." Karachi is worse still: "a black hole," full of "the half-dead," where "fanatic... long-haired dervishes with wild, bloodshot eyes" howl outside "the house of the Devil." Lurid comments are stacked up to support this picture of national delinquency: one cabinet minister is "amiable in the extreme," but when he thinks BHL is not "looking, a gleam of murderous ferociousness would shine through." The ordinary people of Pakistan are portrayed as fanatical Orientals who "scowl" as Lévy passes and "narrow their eyes" with a "tarantula-like stare." One man, "his smile venomous," actually issues a snake-like "hiss."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16823

And is he allied with the neocons? You tell me!

"Thierry Chervel: In the epilogue to your book "American Vertigo," you sketch an impressive panorama of the intellectual landscape in the United States, citing many names from Samuel Huntington to Francis Fukuyama to Paul Berman. Would you say that the intellectual centre of gravity has shifted from Europe to America?

Bernard Henri-Levy: Absolutely. The impact of Christopher Hitchens' articles in Slate or elsewhere, the neo-conservative movement, the way a speech by Charles Krauthammer and a response by Francis Fukuyama fired up discussion for six months - all of that attests to an intellectual vitality and a climate of contention for which Europe is losing its taste. I spent thirty years of my life thinking Paris was the world capital of intellectual discussion. Today Paris has ceded that role to New York in my view. And that's one of the reasons why I accepted Atlantic Monthly's offer (which, let's not forget, meant dedicating two years of my life to the book - one for the trip and another to write it). I felt that going there was crucial if I wanted to go on thinking about the questions I'm passionate about, things that seemed decisive for the future of my children and grandchildren.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1305.html

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Real Truther a.k.a. Verdadero Verdadero

WTCdemolition.com - Harvard Task Force

I apologize for all those overtly sexual emails I sent you pretending to be Steve Jones.

and yes, RT IS my real name, but I would appreciate it if you would call me Ace.

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♠

Real Truther a.k.a. Verdadero Verdadero

WTCdemolition.com - Harvard Task Force