Richard Falk: Professor of Paranoia 

By Kathy Shaidle
April 17, 2008
Front Page Magazine
Original Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=38A7E3B8-D5CE-4C21-818D-42F4CEC405FE
Even within the benighted UN Human Rights Council, today was a dark day for human rights, said Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch. 

Neuer was responding to the March 26 consensus appointment of Richard Falk as the Council’s new (and rather grandly named) Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” In that role, Falk will be tasked with “investigating” Israeli military actions for the next six years.
Richard Falk’s name is familiar to longtime UN watchers. The professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University has a long history of unapologetic anti-American, anti-Israeli views.
Yitzhak Levanon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded to Falk’s appointment by recalling some of the professor’s most notorious writings, including his unapologetic use of the word “holocaust” to “portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel.”
The charge is well founded. In a July 2007 article titled “Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” Falk rhetorically asked whether it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” Falk’s revealing answer: “I think not.” Demonstrating that he was incapable of evaluating Israeli policy with balance – as his new UN post would seem to require – Falk proceeded to condemn Israeli policies as a “holocaust-in-the-making” and deplored what he called the “genocidal tendencies” of the Jewish state.
“This was clearly a singularly inappropriate choice for this position,” commented Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “Falk’s startling record of anti-Israel prejudice should have been enough to preclude him from a position where an unbiased observer is needed to report on the status of human rights in the territories.”
Who is Richard Falk? The author of more than twenty books, 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.

Falk has a long record of opposing U.S. foreign policy going back to 1979, when he expressed support for the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he called the “liberator” of Iran. In a rose-colored op-ed for the New York Times that year -- only months before 52 American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran -- Falk wrote that the “depiction of [Ayatollah Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.” 
Falk has emerged as an outspoken opponent to the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. He insists that the root cause of radical Islamic terrorism is that “the mass of humanity... finds itself under the heels of U.S. economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic power.” It is a revealing commentary on the United Nations that someone who considers jihadists to be the victims of American foreign policy will now be in charge of investigating Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas.
Indeed, Falk clearly considers the United States a bigger threat to international security than Islamic terrorists. Falk frequently has used the term “fascist” to describe the Bush administration and the Patriot Act. In 2003, he condemned what he saw as the “uncritical and chauvinistic patriotism” that swept across America after the 9/11 terrorist attacks: “Without being paranoid, this is the sort of mentality that is capable of fabricating a Reichstag fire as a pretext, so as to achieve more and more control by the state over supposed islands of resistance.” 
That “Reichstag fire” trope is a favorite among 9/11 conspiracy theorists. So it comes as no surprise that Falk is also connected to the dubious “Truther” movement that accuses the Bush administration of secretly staging the attacks in New York and Washington as a pretext for launching the war in Iraq.
David Ray Griffin’s 9/11 conspiracy theory book, The New Pearl Harbor, boasts a breathless foreword by professor Falk, who had lobbied his publishers to accept the manuscript. The foreword once again reveals Falk’s loathing of patriotism, and his paranoid notions of a “fascist” America run by a not-so-secret “neo-conservative” (read: Jewish) cabal:
...there are troubling forces at work that block our access to the truth about 9/11. Ever since 9/11 the mainstream media has worked hand-in-glove with the government in orchestrating a mood of patriotic fervor making any expressions of doubts about the official leadership of the country appear to be conclusive evidence of disloyalty.
In March of this year, Richard Falk told one representative of the “Truther” movement that 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.”
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.
Adding insult to injury was the same-day appointment of another opponent of Israel to the same UN Human Rights Council. Jean Ziegler, co-founder of the “Muammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize” – named for the Libyan dictator whose own human rights record has been rated among “The Worst of the Worst” by Freedom House – was voted onto the Council by an overwhelming majority, as “an expert advisor representing the Western world.” Like Falk, Ziegler has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and is an admirer of dictators, including Ethiopia’s Colonel Mengistu and his Zimbabwean counterpart Robert Mugabe. Ziegler also publicly defends Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy as “one of the leading thinkers of our time.”
Since only three Human Rights Council seats are allotted to Western nations, the appointments of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler dash any hopes of seeing a more balanced Council in the immediate future. And they confirm, yet again, that if the United Nations ever could stake a claim to moral legitimacy, those days are long gone.