The French writer Bernard-Henri-Levy’s book on Daniel Pearl’s murder has been panned by a leading British author and reviewer for being “deeply flawed and riddled with factual errors.”
Levy’s book alleges close links between Pakistani intelligence agencies and Pearl’s abductors and killers.
Reviewing the book – Who Killed Daniel Pearl – William Dalrymple writes in the current issue of the New York Review of Books that “it is apparent from its opening pages that with Pakistan, Levy is way out of his depth.” The book’s “principal problem,” he observes, “is the amateurish quality of much of Levy’s research. Once Levy arrives in Pakistan, the factual underpinnings of the book fall apart. BHL’s grasp of South Asian geography is especially shaky; he thinks Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir (and the major jihadi centre on Pakistani soil) is in India. The madrassa of Akora Khattak, not far from the Indus, he thinks is in Peshawar, while the town of Saharanpur, four hours’ drive from the Indian capital, is said to be a remote part of Delhi.”
Levy also shows, writes Dalrymple, 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 Hurriyet, now the main source 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 madrassa in Karachi. This of course would be a major scoop if true, for Levy would have solved a problem that had 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.”
Dalrymple points out that there are “numerous” occasions where Levy “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 Qaeda.’
The reviewer also accuses Levy of presenting at the end of his book “a series of elaborate and unprovable conspiracy theories.” He claims that Omar Sheikh got ISI money and used it to finance the September 11 attack. The story Levy says Pearl was working on and that led to his abduction and killing, his newspaper the Wall Street Journal denies. Even Pearl’s father said of the Levy book that the author’s evidence “doesn’t gel with the facts.”
Dalrymple writes, “Throughout his book Levy shows an intermittent disdain for Islam, and something approaching hatred for Pakistan. He rightly criticises Pakistanis 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 mullas.’ 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 … The ordinary people of Pakistan are portrayed as fanatical Orientals who ‘scowl’ as Levy passes and ‘narrow their eyes’ with a ‘tarantula-like stare.’ One man ‘his smile venomous’ actually issues a ‘snake-like hiss.’”
Dalrymple writes that in a country distinguished by “its astonishing variety of beautiful women” Levy finds a “world entirely devoid of women.” The reviewer even wonders if Levy even visited Pakistan because the country he writes about is absolutely different from the country the reviewer knows and has travelled in. Levy also finds that in Pakistan “all journalists are, as such, in permanent mortal danger”. He also shows a “profound misunderstanding of Pakistani feelings about India – as well as the realities of journalism in a country where most Western correspondents who cover it (myself included) have usually done so from bases in the Indian capital. In all the 17 years I have written about Pakistan, mostly from my home in New Delhi, I have travelled throughout the country meeting nothing but hospitality, and never once felt personally threatened … For most Pakistanis, India is a complicated country that they admire as much as they fear … The problem with Levy’s wholesale denunciation of Pakistan and its inhabitants is that it gives a portrait in which there is no room for subtlety and nuance.”
Dalrymple also points out that Levy “makes no distinction between secular Pakistanis and their Islamist rivals, between the military and the democrats, or between the dominant tolerant Sufi-influenced Barelvi form of Islam and the newly resurgent more intolerant Wahabi and Deobandi forms of the religion which are now spreading rapidly in Pakistan, partly as a result of heavy Saudi funding of extremist madrassas, becomes more and more radical.
The reviewer also calls Levy’s book “an insult to the memory of a fine journalist”.
French author’s book on Pearl ridiculed
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON:
dailytimes.com.pk |
