Friday, February 01, 2013

A New Atrocity from Richard Falk

1. A Lesson in Torat Moshe (a little early for Purim):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tciT9bmCMq8


2. You probably have heard that a UN commission has issued a "report"
claiming that Israel's building settlements is a crime and sanctions
must be implemented against Israel. The "report" was written by
Richard Falk for the UN.

It is worth reminding readers just who and what Falk is

http://frontpagemag.com/2009/steven-plaut/collaborators-in-the-war-against-the-jews-richard-a-falk-by-steven-plaut/

(from 2009)

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews: Richard A. Falk – by Steven Plaut

Posted By Steven Plaut On December 4, 2009



It is a bit of a shame that Richard A. Falk, professor emeritus of
International Law and Practice from Princeton, cannot go back in time
in some sort of time machine to right historic wrongs. If he could,
there is no doubt at all that he would revise and re-orchestrate the
Nuremberg Trials conducted by the Allies after World War II so that
the leaders of the United States and Britain were the ones indicted
instead. After all, from 1945 onwards the Allies were guilty of
"occupation." Earlier, they had even dared to use military force
against German terrorism, had caused German civilian deaths in their
earlier military incursions and air bombing campaigns, and then
illegally colonized German territories. If it were up to Falk, the
Nuremberg trials would have been devoted to prosecuting the Jews of
Europe for causing so much trouble for those poor innocent Germans.

Falk is not only one of the worst collaborators in the academic wars
against the Jews, he is also America's leading practitioner of the
Orwellian inversion. For Falk, America is a fascist monstrosity,
while the world's fascist and totalitarian monstrosities are
democratic enclaves of freedom. For him, Israel is a terrorist
aggressor, while the Arab terrorist aggressors are innocent victims
and peace-loving progressives. For him, Israel is a Nazi-like country
seeking genocide, while the genocidal Islamofascists of the Hamas and
their backers are merely protesters against social inequality inside
Israel. For him, terrorist aggression against Jews is really the
pursuit of peace, while self-defense by Israel is criminal, terrorist
aggression and genocide.

So who exactly is Richard Falk? He is basically an Ivy League version
of Ward Churchill. He has described himself as an "assimilationist
Jewish with a virtual denial of even the ethnic side of Jewishness."
According to Martin Peretz of the New Republic, "Yes, let me assure
you, this hater of Israel is a Jew. And, also yes, this hater of
America is an American. " Falk's only interest in his Jewish origins
is when he can use them as a bludgeon against Israel and other Jews.
According to one report, Falk may have converted to the Baha'i
religion. Falk's wife is a Turkish Moslem.

And just what is Falk's agenda? When addressing an audience of
supporters of the anti-Israel organization "Sabeel," Falk thus spoke:
"During a question and answer period after remarks by Richard Falk,
the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the
Palestinian Territories, an audience member urged people to 'vote the
Jewish state out of existence.' Enthusiastic applause erupted up and
down the pews." For Falk, it goes without saying that Israel must be
annihilated. He cannot imagine any form of Middle East "peace" in
which the Jews have not been driven into the sea. In his words, "If
we are to re-imagine peace, we have to stop thinking of the
conventional two-state solution, this idea of two people living in
separate states would be a disaster."

But there is so much more! Falk is a conspiracy nut who is involved up
to his hairline in the "911 Truth" conspiracy cult, which claims that
the Bush Administration was actually behind the 911 attacks on the US.
Falk has repeated over and over his "suspicion" that high American
officials, conniving with nefarious Jewish neo-conservatives, were the
real culprits who organized the attacks on the World Trade Center and
on the Pentagon. Falk wrote a sycophantic foreword for a conspiracy
"book" by one David Ray Griffin, "The New Pearl Harbor." Falk
championed that "book" and helped get it a publisher. Here is Falk's
take on 911:


"As far as I can tell, the real explanation is a widely shared fear of
what sinister forces might lay beneath the unturned stones of a full
and honest investigation of 9/11. Ever since the assassinations in the
1960s of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X there has
been waged a powerful campaign against 'conspiracy theory' that has
made anyone who dares question the official story to be branded as a
kook or some kind of unhinged troublemaker. In this climate of
opinion, any political candidate for high office who dared raise
doubts about the official version of 9/11 would immediately be branded
as unfit, and would lose all political credibility. It is impossible
to compete in any public arena in the United States if a person comes
across as a '9/11 doubter.'"

Writing a in the Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2002), "Professors of
Palestine," Martin Kramer observed that "extracting…ex cathedra
rulings from Falk is easy business." Kramer added: "I hadn't seen
Falk's authority invoked so reverentially since my own student days at
Princeton. Back then, he was the leading campus enthusiast of the
Ayatollah Khomeini. 'The depiction of Khomeini as fanatical,
reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and
happily false,' he wrote in 1979. 'Iran may yet provide us with a
desperately-needed model of humane government for a third-world
country.' I well recall watching him preside over a 'teach-in' in
support of the revolution, which was going to end human rights abuses
in Iran. And I recall student groupies applauding fanatically, as if
in a trance."

Falk's publication record is a one-sided indictment of everything
Western and a one-sided exoneration of everything anti-Western. He
was an early sycophant of the Ayatollah Khomeini, publishing in the
New York Times on February 16, 1979 a piece titles "Trusting
Khomeini." The New Republic claims Falk considered the Ayatollah to
be the Messiah. Falk also was a cheerleader for the Khmer Rouge. He
regularly writes for viciously anti-American and anti-Semitic web
sites such as "Counterpunch" and "Znet."

Kramer adds, "Falk is famous for his one-size-fits-all definition of
war crimes and crimes against humanity." So, "in 1998…he warned
officials responsible for implementing the United Nations sanctions
against Iraq of their 'criminal accountability for complicity in the
commission of crimes against humanity.' The persistence of American
leaders in carrying out the sanctions regime 'subjects them to
potential criminal responsibility.'"

Naturally, Falk also sees conspiracies being perpetrated by
Neo-conservatives (meaning Jews) against far-leftist academics. He
opines: "There's no doubt that there's a concerted right-wing attempt
to intimidate professors who advocate critical views, especially on
Middle East issues and on the Bush presidency." To drive home his
point, he served as a cheerleader and apologist for Ward Churchill
when the latter dismissed the American victims of 9-11 as "little
Eichmanns."

Falk has been ferociously opposed to the Allied liberation of Iraq.
He described the invasion as a "war of aggression" by the United
States and its allies, and – naturally – also compares it to the
crimes of German Nazis in World War II. Orwellian inversions
involving Nazis are Falk's favorite metaphor, and he seems to compose
several before breakfast each day. Elsewhere he has stated, "It is
not an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of
Palestinians with the criminalized Nazi record of collective
atrocity." He compared Attorney General like John Ashcroft to the
Nazi conspirators who set the Reichstag on fire.

Falk dismisses the Domestic Security Enhancement Act and the Patriot
Act as "sweeping powers" that represent a "slide toward fascism." He
routinely denounces America for being an imperialist power, an empire.
In 2003 he published a diatribe, "Will the Empire be Fascist?"
There he insists that terror warnings and threat assessments are tools
used by the American government to frighten and control the public.
He has demanded that American sovereignty be constricted and subjected
to a "Global Peoples' Assembly," a governing body whose members would
"represent the worldwide voice of the people in action and decision
making." You know, people like Hugo Chavez and Muammar Khaddafi, who
would decide there what America can and cannot do.

But Falk's special animosity is reserved for Israel. He has been
trying for decades to get Israel obliterated. And that track record
qualified him to serve as the special investigator into "Israeli war
crimes" on behalf of the United Nations! In 2007 Falk published,
"Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust," in which he wrote that it
was not an "irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of
Palestinians (by Israel)" with the "criminalized Nazi record of
collective atrocity." His title is a thin plagiarism of the title of
a book by Robert Bork, "Slouching Towards Gemorrah." The article may
be Falk's most openly anti-Semite diatribe. In it, he accuses Israel
of mistreating Palestinians on a scale comparable to the Nazi
extermination of Jews. He writes:


"Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of
Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective
atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially
disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on
the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community
to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that
this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a
rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to
international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current
genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever
the ethos of 'a responsibility to protect,' recently adopted by the UN
Security Council as the basis of 'humanitarian intervention' is
applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of
Gaza from further pain and suffering."

Falk then went on to argue that the plight of the Palestinians is
worse than the victims of genocide in Rwanda: "But Gaza is morally
far worse (than Rwanda), although mass death has not yet resulted."
That single sentence may be the most telling of all the inanities Falk
has ever invented.

Jonathan Kay, writing in the Canadian National Post, dismissed Falk as
an anti-Jewish bigot and as "an anti-Israel hit man:"

"Falk accuses Israel of having 'genocidal tendencies,' and calls the
international response to the situation in Gaza "morally far worse"
than its response to the 1994 Rwanda genocide (death toll: 800,000)
and Srebrenica — despite the fact that there is not a single recorded
instance of Israel implementing a program of deliberately killing
civilians in Gaza, let alone mass murder."

The article concludes by declaring, "To persist with [Israeli
policies] is indeed genocidal, and risks destroying an entire
Palestinian community that is an integral part of an ethnic whole. It
is this prospect that makes appropriate the warning of a Palestinian
holocaust in the making, and should remind the world of the famous
post-Nazi pledge of 'never again.' What a scandal to imagine that
this ignorant ideologue is the expert in whom the UNHRC has entrusted
its fact-finding in Gaza and the West Bank. In fact, notwithstanding
his shrill opinions, Falk clearly doesn't actually know anything about
Gaza and West Bank." No, Falk is not beneath commandeering every
iota of Jewish suffering in history to demonize Israel, even the
"Never Again" slogan coined following the Holocaust in World War II.

There is almost no distortion of the truth that Falk will not embrace
when he jihads against Israel. He defends the "election" of the Hamas
in Gaza as a "fair election." His evidence? Jimmy Carter said so.
He deliberately inverts history in the worst Orwellian manner. The
Hamas has been seeking ceasefires with Israel, but Israel keeps
violating them, according to the learned oprofessor. Israel and the
US are all to blame for the rise of Hamas hegemony in Gaza, opines
Falk, because Israel failed to capitulate sufficiently to the heads of
the PLO and the US failed to coerce Israel to do so: "This latest turn
in policy needs to be understood in the wider context of the Israeli
refusal to reach a reasonable compromise with the Palestinian people
since 1967." The reasonable compromise the Palestinians demand of
course is Israel's complete extermination.

In 2001, when he retired from Princeton, the misnamed U.N. Commission
on Human Rights decided to send a biased "commission of inquiry" to
bash Israel over its supposed violation of human rights. Falk was one
of three members chosen. The other two were also anti-Israel: John
Dugard, a South African from Leiden University in the Netherlands who
considers Israel a racist apartheid-like regime, and Kamal Hussein,
former Bangladeshi foreign minister. Alan Dershowitz dismissed Falk
as a bigot and as someone who made up his mind long before he began
any "investigation." In Dershowitz' view, appointing Falk is
comparable to the following: "Imagine the UN appointing David Duke to
report on how Blacks are victimizing Whites, or Hugo Chavez to report
on American foreign policy, or Mohammad Ahmadinejad to investigate
whether the Holocaust occurred."

In 2008 the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) officially
appointed Falk to a six-year term as a "United Nations Special
Rapporteur" on "the situation of human rights in the Palestinian
territories occupied since 1967." I guess Noam Chomsky wasn't
available. US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton explained why Falk was
selected: "He was picked for a reason, and the reason is not to have
an objective assessment — the objective is to find more ammunition to
go after Israel."

This new commission reached its conclusions long before it was even
convened. In Falk's words, the purpose of the commission was this:
"The central issue is to ask whether Israel has used excessive force
in responding to the Palestinian political demonstrations." Note
that he and his sidekicks had no interest in the countless terrorist
atrocities and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians launched by
Palestinians. In fact, Falk essentially came out in favor of
Palestinian terrorism even before the commission began its work: "One
is evaluating whether the conditions of occupation are such as to give
the Palestinians some kind of right of resistance. And if they have
that right, then what are the limits to that right?" The only
difference between terrorism and "resistance" depends entirely on
whether on not Falk endorses it. Falk used the same opportunity to
denounce Israel as a colonialist entity.

In May, 2008, and recalling his early campaigns against Israel on
behalf of the UN, Israel refused to allow Falk to enter the country at
all as a UN representative. He tried to enter again in December, was
detained for 30 hours in Tel Aviv airport and then given the bum's
rush out. Falk joined the tiny club of anti-Semites so extreme that
Israel refuses to allow them to enter the country. Of "academics"
barred from entering Israel, Falk shares that honor only with Neo-Nazi
Norman Finkelstein, who was evicted from Israel thanks to
Finkelstein's intimate ties to the Hezb'Allah terrorists. (Even Noam
Chomsky and numerous other blatant anti-Semites enter Israel all the
time with no problem, and many lecture at Israeli universities.
Israel only evicts the worst collaborators with terrorism!)

When Falk was evicted, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior explicitly
cited Falk's long record of anti-Israel hate propaganda in its
decision to ban his entry. Simona Halperin, the director of Israel's
International Organization and Human Rights department, called Falk
"completely unobjective," citing his comparisons of Israelis to Nazis
and of Israel's actions against the Palestinians to the Holocaust.
Writing in the Israeli daily Maariv, Uri Yablonka commented on the
expulsion of Falk: "It is not every day that the Foreign Ministry
decides to ban a senior United Nations emissary from entering Israel,
especially when the person involved is a Jewish academic. But in the
case of Prof. Richard Falk from the United States, Israel made an
exception. This was because in the past Falk voiced support for
suicide attacks and compared Israel's activity with that of the
Nazis." The editor of Maariv dismissed Falk as a repulsive maniac.

When Israel launched its anti-terror campaign in Gaza in 2008, "Cast
Lead," Falk repeatedly and mechanically denounced all Israeli defense
operations as "war crimes." Evidently the only form of Jewish
self-defense against Hamas rockets that Falk is willing to approve is
total capitulation. Even grabbing ships full of arms bound for
Islamofascist terrorists is "criminal," according to Falk, and an
abuse of Palestinian rights. He repeatedly called for
Nuremberg-style indictments of Israeli leaders for "war crimes." Falk
is not above outright falsification when it comes to his prettifying
the Hamas or demonizing Israel.

As for Falk's other political associations, Kathy Shaidle lists some
of these: "Falk is a prominent member of the International Association
of Democratic Lawyers, which the CIA once characterized as 'one of the
most useful Communist front organizations at the service of the Soviet
Communist Party.' Today Falk chairs the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
whose recommended strategy for combating terrorism is to increase U.S.
aid to those countries that act as a breeding ground for terrorists."
The New Republic's Martin Peretz insists that he "finds human rights
abuses Right and Left but on second thought only Right."

Kathie Shaidle sums Falk up thus: "Were Falk simply an obscure crank,
his views about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 could be
written off as the rantings of a sadly delusional individual.
However, Falk's enthusiasm for conspiracy theories casts grave doubts
about the levels of objectivity and competence he will bring to his
new 'investigative' position at the United Nations. Unlike the
scientific method or other rational methods of deduction, conspiracy
theories work backwards from frequently tenuous 'evidence,' in order
to 'prove' the conspiracist's pre-determined theories. Richard Falk
publicly has sided with radical Islam over America and Israel for
three decades, with little consideration for facts and evidence.
Given that, and his gullible support for bizarre 9/11 'revelations,'
critics have good reason to suspect that, as a UN 'investigator,' Falk
will leave a great deal to be desired."

As the Hamas' point man serving the UN commission, Falk did indeed
deliver the goods, as expected.





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