The most high-profile international champion of the Kurdish cause arrived at the 2018 AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC to urge a redoubling of bipartisan support for the Kurds among American legislators.

“You have in this country decent people who do not understand why their Administration decided to betray their best allies, the friends of the country of George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy,” the French-Jewish writer and public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy told The Algemeiner on Monday, following a special session on Sunday at the AIPAC conference on the current multi-front crisis facing the largest stateless nation in the Middle East.

Lévy said he was encouraged that “you have a handful of congressmen and senators, and maybe even more than a handful, who are discontent with the absurd and suicidal attitude of the West regarding the Kurds.”

On Tuesday night, Lévy will attend a special public screening in Washington, DC of his documentary film Peshmerga, in which he accompanied Kurdish fighters battling the ISIS terrorist organization in Iraq, recording their thoughts and reflections along the way. Hosted by a group of Congressional legislators, Lévy paid tribute to the group as “true friends of the Kurds, regardless of political party, and true friends of American values.” Appearing alongside Lévy at the event will be Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s representative to the US.

Lévy did not sugarcoat his analysis of the pressures on the Kurds since last September’s independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan resulted an Iranian-backed onslaught against the Erbil-based Kurdish government. In the ensuing conflict, Lévy said, the Kurds suffered a “huge defeat” with the loss of the key city of Kirkuk and the imposition by the Iraqi central government in Baghdad of a blockade on international flights into Kurdistan’s airports. Further west, Turkish forces have continued to step up their assault on Syrian Kurdish fighters in the Afrin enclave, leading Lévy to assert in a recent interview that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would be better understood as “a Sultan who aims to restore the Ottoman Empire in the region.”