John Rosenthal, World Politics Review, 10 September 2008
Upon arriving in Gori, Lévy reports seeing a city on fire. Gori is “a Georgian town,” Lévy writes, “And [the Russians] have burned it down, pillaged it, reduced it to a ghost town.” The full passage (in the translation of the Huffington Post) reads as follows:
After crossing through six new check points, one of which consists of a tree trunk hoisted up and down by a winch commanded by a group of paramilitaries, we arrive in Gori. We are not in the center of the city. But from where Lomaia has dropped us, before taking off in the Audi to collect his wounded, from this intersection dominated by an enormous tank as big as a rolling bunker, we can see fires burning everywhere. Rockets lighting up the sky at regular intervals, followed by short detonations. The emptiness. The slight odor of putrefaction and death. Most of all, the incessant rumbling of armored vehicles. Almost every other car is an unmarked car jammed with militia, recognizable because of their white armbands and their headbands. Gori does not belong to the Ossetia which the Russians claim they have come to “liberate.” It is a Georgian town. And they have burned it down, pillaged it, reduced it to a ghost town.
The problem with this account, however, is that Lévy appears not to have seen what he reported seeing. In fact, as has since been confirmed by other members of the group and even conceded by members of Lévy’s own entourage, Lévy never made it to Gori.
Not only a fabulist, but when you take his Kosovo and Metohia as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina “opus” BHL is the fabulist extraordinaire, of the kind that ought to be criminalized, as part of international humanitarian law. His lies cost lives of real people in suport of imperialism (of a country that is not even his own), and this shold be an international crime par excellence.
And let me add, BHL “fabulizes” words into peoples’ mouths. Case in point: his recent “open letter” to the next President of the USA sets up Russia as an enemy, emphasizing the horrific claim, made by Vladimir Putin, that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”. BHL adds: “He really said that”, and wrings his soul that Putin would have the audacity to compare the collapse of the Soviet Union to WWII, to Aucshwitz, to Rwanda…And yet, upon verification, Putin, in fact, refered to a “geopolitical” catastrophe, so BHL’s wails of outrage are again shown to be produced by his propensity to invent and distort. Always in lockstep with the demands of US imperialist foreign policy.