Deux Ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais De Lui

By UD. It takes guts to be a high-profile moral - nay, spiritual - leader and a plagiarist.  Ask Richard Land. Given the likelihood of capture, you need to have that Elmer Gantry, je m'en fous, caution to the winds, borderline-psycho thing.  You need to have Gantry's arrogant assurance that you can break the rules in all sorts of additional ways - in the case of Gilles Bernheim, Chief Rabbi of France, that you can employ a ghostwriter and not tell your publisher; that you can accuse a dead man who was your student of having plagiarized you; that you can plagiarize in other places in the book in question as well as in earlier books bearing your name; and that you can, for the final flourish on your intellectual fraudulence, lie about having earned an agrégation degree.  You need to believe that you can do all of these things and not get caught.  You need to believe that when you are discovered to have lied about having done these things, people won't feel contempt for you and ask you to resign the position you've corrupted. Read more...