He was already famous. Glucksmann (I have a Penguin books anthology on May '68, w/ a Glucksmann piece, and NLR in the 70's published a piece by him on Althusser, "A Ventriloquist Structuralism, " , Paul Berman had a Mother Jones piece on him in the early 80's and Levy had been on the cover of Time in the late 70's and Marty Peretz had lauded him in TNR when the, "New Philosophers, " woke up the PCF'isant left, decades after David Rousset published l'univers concentrationnaire in '47 or so about the GULAG.
You gonna call Susan Sontag a media hog for going to Sarajevo for a yr. when the people there were under the most severe threat from Serb snipers?
Yes, the jihadists in Chechnya had added tremendously to the devastation of Chechnya. But, you really don't want to defend the Russian regime in their tactics in the 1st and 2nd Chechen Wars do you? Reducing Grozny to rubble, filtration camps, and all the rest? How is what they are doing to the Chechens different from what Israel is/has done to Palestinians? What we did to Vietnamese, Salvadoreans, Guatemalans, Chileans, Indonesians and on and on...?