The French should be proud. Their values – secularism, citizenship, equality – are today being waved in bruised and divided countries, where we didn’t expect it. In Lebanon, huge crowds, young, colorful, united beyond their differences, demand that an end is being put to the old confessional system. Born after the civil war, hostile to the manipulation of their small country by rival and predatory powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, these demonstrators reinvent, in Levant, the beautiful “fatherland” word. Hezbollah, contested for the first time in its own strongholds, vainly sends its soldiers to attempt to crush the movement.
When he died in 2003, Bernard-Henri Lévy had described former President Aliza Izetbegovic as “de Gaulle of Bosnia in struggle”. However, it was this man who wrote in 1980: “The Muslims have formed the plan to take control of the fate of their world and to shape it thanks to their own conceptions”. Head of state during the Balkan War, Aliza Izetbegovic welcomed thousands of jihadists from all over the world.
What might philosophers tell us as we live through a pandemic crisis that forces us to be confined to our homes and avoid our fellow human beings? Obviously, we will have to listen to the scientific, medical and technical word. Scientists are the only ones who can give us practical answers on how to respond to the attacks of this dangerous virus.
Back in Libya, nine years after the uprising that put an end to the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi, Bernard-Henry Lévy (BHL) raised a lively controversy within the pro-Sarraj clan, the leader of the ill-named “Government of National Accord”, which the author of « La barbarie à visage humain » nevertheless came to support, in particular through a report on mass graves attributed to the forces of Marshal Haftar in Tarhouna, a city taken over by the pro-Sarraj forces last June.
Ultimate libertarian and subversive mode of artistic expression, the street art experienced a spectacular proliferation during the Covid-19 pandemic. At a time when museums, theatres, concert halls and cinemas were forced to close, and when the world of art and culture was suffering the full force of the horrors of confinement, street art managed to sneak out, literally and figuratively!
Preparing a trip to Syria or Somalia can now earn you years in prison in Switzerland. Bern is developing preventive justice and wants to take on “potential terrorists”, like some sci-fi movies which say that in the future the police will not only arrest the perpetrators of a heist, but will have the right to intercept the people who brought up the idea to commit a robbery…
In order to denounce the opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islam, communicators linked to Qatar usually used pseudonyms. He could also occasionally call on François Burgat, a retired researcher, now president of the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies (CAREP) in Paris, an organisation financed by the gas emirate. However, the latest article, “Mud on Qatar,” published on June 20 on a blog hosted by Mediapart, is signed by Paolo Fusi, a scandalous character, author of crude forgeries during the last Gulf War.
The modus operandi often adopted by China to make inroads into economically weaker nations, whether in Asia, Africa or Latin America, has been to strike deals with corrupt Heads of State. This enables Chinese companies to not only further their business interests in that country but the Chinese State to surreptitiously penetrate the nation’s polity, with the objective to ensure its long-term influence. The Himalayan nation of Nepal is emerging as a classic example of this Chinese machination where the ruling Nepal Communist Party, led by Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has been seen to blatantly advance Chinese interests, to the extent that it has made many senior members of his party uncomfortable.
According to a UN investigation, jihadist groups in Africa have set up a new means of financing their terrorist activities through the trafficking of fake medicines. Mali is designated as the main hub of this juicy traffic.
