Richard Falk and
the ‘rapporteur’s’ Holocaust
Richard Falk,
valiant defender of America’s
secular heritage!
Don’t ever send a college professor to do a man’s job. The United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed Richard Falk Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories. There is no special ‘rapporteur’ for Israel. Falk will replace John Dugant of South Africa. It’s a six-year term. Falk is not a friend of Israel…or of the Bush administration…or of Capitalism…and more recently of the 9/11 Commission. He is beginning to think it was an inside job.
Falk was an ardent admirer of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. He is closer to Jimmy Carter on Israel and to Rosie O’Donnell on his knowledge of structural steel than most college professors. As for his investigative powers no one would mistake him for that other Falk, Peter—TV’s famous Colombo—but investigating he will go. Colombo had an open searching mind; Professor Falk made up his mind on the Middle East 30 years ago and the road he has taken ends in Mecca, not in Paul’s Damascus. If the Human Rights Council was actually concerned with human rights and wanted to send a first-class rapporteur to the Middle East it would have chosen someone else, not a college professor who has piddled away three decades trying to prove Yasser Arafat and the PLO the moral equivalents of George Washington and the Continental Army—a college professor less burdened with his own self-importance who just might know the difference between a madrassas and the Boy Scouts of America. Colombo might have been a bit unkempt but he kept an open mind; he cleared out the rubbish every few days to make room for new insights. Richard Falk has let the debris of 30 years of misinformation collect.
By the way…incidentally…and another thing…
Falk is to investigate “Israel’s violations of the principles and bases of international law.” He will not investigate Palestinian violations. Does this scenario have a precedent? Has anything like this ever happened before? Well, sure. One can picture Der Fuhrer assigning Julius Streicher to investigate Jewish transgressions of the Aryan supremacy laws. Of course Streicher strode about Berlin with a whip in his hand. Falk will not be that obvious. He prefers mortarboards, Doctorates and long-winded dissertations to riding crops, boots and jodhpurs. Hamas will take care of the rough stuff.
No one can accuse Falk of being an anti-Semite. “It is especially painful for me,” he says, “as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust.””
Then why does he persist in doing so? He’s a college professor. There are other words he can use. How about Jihad? How about Risorgimento? How about struggle? How about self-preservation? They are more accurate than holocaust. A perceptive college professor should be able to transcend morel equivalency. He should be able to do better than Jimmy Carter and Diane Finestein. It’s amazing what 30 years in academia can do to a relatively intelligent man’s grasp on reality.
Metaphor or no metaphor, Falk has compared Israeli actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis and he stands resolutely behind his comments. But he is a college professor and one would expect him to have some familiarity with Oradour Sur Glane and Lidice and some awareness of what it might be like to have his stomach torn open by ten-penny nails while munching on garlic bread in a pizza parlor in Jerusalem. The civilian casualties at Oradour and Lidice were not collateral damage and neither were the dead Israelis in the Jerusalem pizza parlor nor were the victims of other suicide bomber attacks on busses and bar mitzvahs. The killings were intentional and meant to terrorize.
The Israelis have not responded by attacking civilians but have went after the terrorists and if Falk were academically pure at heart, he would never have made his ridiculous comparison. Being forced to show identification at a checkpoint is not a gross abridgement of international law and morality except in the minds of Ward Churchill, Ibrahim Hooper and the Saudi-sponsored professors in the Middle East Studies Department at Colombia University. (There are others)
What Israel is doing in Gaza, says Falk, is a form of collective punishment. Sure, and so are the taxes Americans pay that help finance the UN, the PLO, Princeton University and Falk’s livelihood. Not much bang for the buck, but to equate security measures and self-preservation with Nazi terrorism, as Falk is doing, is worse than Orwellian—it is Goebbelesque.
The PLO in its various mutations has murdered more Palestinians than the Israelis, has stolen more money intended for the Palestinians than Capone took out of Chicago and spreads more hatred in a single day than Stormfront, the Klan and the Aryan Nation can do in a thousand.
Would it be asking too much of Richard Falk to get out in the world and take a look around, stare truth in the face, commune with Norm Peterson and Cliff Claven instead of Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky? Falk spends more time wailing and gnashing his teeth over what happened to 100,000 Japanese-Americans interned during World War II than commiserating with the survivors of those who lost their lives in the World Trade Center on 9/11, a disaster that he now believes, after high level discussions with Kevin Barrett, to have been an inside job. The Pentagon will be more difficult to explain.
“The record leads to the unhappy conclusion,” he said, “that ours is a political culture that doesn’t handle stress very well.”
Really? Rosie the Riveter went back to work on 9/12; John Henry on 9/13. The economy didn’t collapse and there were no mass suicides. How is that for stress management? There are more Pattons and Shermans left in America than Falk would like.
“It (America) has set some dreadful precedents in past dealing with groups and ideas that were viewed as hostile to the beliefs and interests of the American mainstream,” says Falk.
Was he talking about fascism and communism? Of course not, he was talking about J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and George W. Bush. Many of those swimming in Falk’s mainstream haven’t recovered from the fall of the Soviet Union.
“What I think we have to realize, with alarm,” says Falk, “is that a group of evangelical geo-politicians have seized control of the government, sensing their historical opportunity to shape the future of the world and that this reactionary cabal is supported and reinforced by the religious right in America that is also now, for the first time, exerting a direct influence on our political destiny, challenging the secular heritage of the country.”
Secular heritage? Where did that come from? Barack Obama?
How is this for a secular heritage?
“Every student shall attend worship in the college hall morning and evening at the hours appointed and shall behave with gravity and reverence during the whole service. Every student shall attend public worship on the Sabbath…Besides the public exercises of religious worship on the Sabbath, there shall be assigned to each class certain exercises for their religious instruction suited to the age and standing of the pupils…and no student belonging to any class shall neglect them. (The Laws of the College of New-Jersey (Princeton), requirements during the presidency of John Witherspoon, president directly before the American Revolution)
My! My! Heretics at
Princeton! And the 1850s too! Is there anything else Falk could be wrong about?