Paris attackers are not 'les Misérables'

By Sefy Hendler published in Haaretz November 21, 2015

Bernard-Henri Lévy spent Paris’ black night in the streets of the City of Light. “I felt that this was a frightened city,” the public intellectual told Haaretz. “A city under siege. A city that is now afraid that it will be attacked again soon, but also a city that has started to resist.”

Like so many Parisians, Lévy has a friend who found himself in the line of fire, Yann Revol, a press photographer. Revol was at the Le Petit Cambodge restaurant, where, along with the Le Carillon bar next door, 15 people were killed.

“I stayed in touch with him by phone until the rescue services arrived,” Lévy says. “He hid in the restaurant kitchen, wounded. I realized immediately that Paris was at war.”

Lévy tweeted that night: “Charlie Hebdo was a symbol. Now it’s war,” a statement that reverberated in the words of President Francois Hollande, who in his speech that night described the acts in precisely the same way: "war."

Later in the week Lévy flew to New York; from there he spoke to Haaretz to discuss the war that France is experiencing at the moment — to its astonishment for the most part. In France after November 13, just as in the United States after September 11, the definition “war” implies heavy ramifications for the foreign and domestic policy of the country under attack.

The first glance turns inward — how far will France go with its state of emergency that has been extended for three months? There’s also the question of changes to the constitution that would mean a draconian restriction of certain civil rights.

“I don’t think that at present the balance between liberty and security is changing dramatically in France,” he says. For Lévy, the change “is less than what happened in the United States with the legislation of the Patriot Act, and less than what happened in France during the Algerian war.”

“I think the lessons from the past that have been learned by the government and the emergency steps now being taken are being presented cautiously ... that the borderline is very narrow and we have to do everything possible to avoid crossing it,” he says... Read more.

Source : http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-1.687434