Rael Jean Isaac

Just when you thought the UN had plumbed the depth of evil absurdity, the organization trumps itself. The latest imbecility: the (new, improved, reformed) UN Human Rights Council by unanimous vote has appointed Richard Falk to a newly created position to report on human rights violations by Israel against the Palestinians (as far as the UN Human Rights Council is concerned – check the website—Israel is the only identified offender against human rights.) Falk’s lofty title, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton, merely illustrates the degradation of our elite universities.

Falk has gone one better on his predecessor as investigator into Israel’s misdeeds for the UN Human Rights Council. In The Times (UK) of April 15 David Aaronovitch points out that while his predecessor only compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, Falk had compared Israel to Nazi Germany. Not only that, after his UN appointment, he assured the BBC that he stood by the analogy. A dependable anti-Israel activist (one of those Jewish defamers of Israel whose ilk is analyzed in Alexander and Bogdanor’s The Jewish Divide Over Israel) Falk could be counted on as signatory to anti-Israel ads over many years, was a board member of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; and was a sponsor of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, a pioneer in working to create a pro-PLO coalition in the U.S.

Nor is Falk a neophyte when it comes to attacking Israel in the name of “human rights” at the UN. When Arafat launched his mini-war on Israel in 2000 (the so-called second intifada), the (then) UN Human Rights Commission appointed Falk as one of three international “experts” to prepare a report on the use of force by Israel against the Palestinians. The resolution establishing the commission announced the result before the commission even began its work, stating that Israel’s actions (never mind that Israel was doing the minimum to defend its citizens) “constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity.”
Falk had proved his suitability to serve as UN “expert” with an article in the Winter 2000 issue of MERIP’s Middle East Report. Falk began his article “International Law and the al-Aqsa Intifada” by declaring that while the Israeli government and the U.S. media persisted in describing the intifada as a disruption of the peace process, in international law the Palestinian resistance to occupation was a legally protected right. In short, the PA had every right to shoot Israelis and they had no right to respond.
MERIP itself–the Middle East Research and Information Project--was a fitting home for the article. Described in 1972 in B’nai Brith’s Facts as a “propaganda mill of the Far Left” MERIP’s chief problem for years was deciding with which branch of the Palestinian revolution to identify. Its sympathies clearly lay with George Habash in his tactical struggle with Arafat but it “evenhandedly” sent out publications of both Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When terrorists gunned down Israel’s athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich, MERIP issued a flyer declaring that while it was “regrettable” when people were killed, “we should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action…It has provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians in the camps.”

For years Falk was best known for his love affair with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Along with one-time attorney Ramsay Clark, Falk visited Khomeini while he was still a refugee in Paris and came back to reassure the American public that the Ayatollah was a “moderate.” Writing in The New York Times, Falk insisted that the American press had “defamed” Khomeini. “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” wrote Falk, “the work of political opponents seeking to frighten people.” His close advisers, Falk claimed, were “uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.” Falk’s endorsement was important at the time for the Shah still ruled Iran and Khomeini needed to build international support.

When Khomeini turned out to be all that his opponents accused him of, and more, Falk did not falter in his support. On the contrary, in June 1980, seven months after the U.S. embassy had been seized and the American hostages imprisoned, Falk and Ramsey Clark went on a pilgrimage to Teheran where they participated in the Khomeini regime’s anti-American “war crimes” tribunal.

Post 9/11 Falk has gone completely off the rails. While there is a widespread, if false, belief that Israel is the villain in the Arab-Israel conflict, Falk lacks such cover for his newest tenet: that the World Trade Center was probably a “false flag” operation, likely perpetrated by the villainous “neocons.” Here is what he said (as reported by Eli Lake in The New York Sun, April 10, 2008) in a March 24 interview with radio host Kevin Barrett, co-founder of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth: “It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don’t think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is that there is a lot of grounds for suspicion; there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess.”

If Falk is a trifle mealy-mouthed here, he is clearly more forthright with the like-minded. Barrett praised him as a scholar “sympathetic to the 9/11 truth movement.” Indeed, in 2004 Falk wrote the forward to David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor. Aaronovich describes Griffin as the “intellectual guru of the ‘Bush blew up the twin towers’ movement” who argues that no plane hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Center was brought down by a controlled demolition. Falk also wrote a chapter for Griffin’s 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out in which he warned darkly: “Momentous suspicious events bearing on the legitimacy of the process of governance in the U.S have been consistently shielded from mainstream inquiry by being re-inscribed as the wild fantasies of ‘conspiracy theorists’…The management of suspicion is itself suspicious.”

This nut-case is now the UN Human Rights Council’s judge and jury on Israel. Daniel Carmon, deputy permanent representative of Israel to the UN, has said: “We are asking the UN not to send him. We cannot agree to Mr. Falk’s entrance into Israel in his capacity as the rapporteur.” If Israel backs down on this, and allows him access, it will be acting as an enabler and deserve the “reportage” it gets.