According to Vox’s Max Fisher, French celebrity intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy is a bigot who has an intellectual kinship with violent criminals. This columnist is not BHL’s most ardent admirer, but we’d nonetheless like to defend him against Fisher’s calumny.Fisher doesn’t mention Levy by name, but his is a broad indictment that certainly includes the Frenchman in its sweep. Fisher’s headline: “Stop Asking Muslims to Condemn Terrorism. It’s Bigoted and Islamophobic.” In today’s Wall Street Journal, Levy does just that:
Those whose faith is Islam must proclaim very loudly, very often and in great numbers their rejection of this corrupt and abject form of theocratic passion. Too often have we heard that France’s Muslims should be summoned to explain themselves. They don’t need to explain themselves, but they should feel called to express their tangible brotherhood with their massacred fellow citizens. In so doing, they would put to rest once and for all the lie of a spiritual commonality between their faith as they know it and that of the murderers.
They have the responsibility—the opportunity—before history and their own conscience to echo the “Not in our name!” with which Britain’s Muslims dissociated themselves last year from the Islamic State killers of journalist James Foley. But they also have the even more urgent duty to define their identity as sons and daughters of an Islam of tolerance and peace.
Here is Fisher’s objection:
This expectation we place on Muslims, to be absolutely clear, is Islamophobic and bigoted. The denunciation is a form of apology: an apology for Islam and for Muslims. The implication is that every Muslim is under suspicion of being sympathetic to terrorism unless he or she explicitly says otherwise. The implication is also that any crime committed by a Muslim is the responsibility of all Muslims simply by virtue of their shared religion.
This sort of thinking—blaming an entire group for the actions of a few individuals, assuming the worst about a person just because of their [sic] identity—is the very definition of bigotry. It is also, by the way, the very same logic that leads French non-Muslims, outraged by the Charlie Hebdo murders, to attack French mosques in hateful and misguided retaliation.
We’d agree that attacks on mosques are hateful and misguided. Apart from that, every word of the quoted passage is wrong.