At the U.N., an ugly shade of lipstick on the caterpillar

{This column was first printed in the April 11, 2008 edition of The Jewish State}

The government is lying about who shot JFK. The government is lying about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government is lying about Pearl Harbor. The government is lying about 9/11.

Not sure if he's covered the moon landing, but former Princeton professor Richard Falk thinks the government is lying to you about the above formative historical events. According to Falk, the government has also been lying about Yasser Arafat being a terrorist, and, as he said in April 2002, "we should at least be clear that [Ariel] Sharon is a much bigger obstacle to real peace than Arafat is or ever was."

Falk's hard work has paid off; on March 26, he was appointed "special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

This newspaper offered a less than glowing appraisal of the efforts of Falk's predecessor, John Dugard, in a recent issue. As I am not especially given to "piling on," the U.N. would have to have appointed someone so clearly possessed of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist conspiracy theories to replace Dugard in order to provoke an immediate response on these pages.

True to form, they did.

Last year, Falk set out to pad his resume with something that would put him a step ahead of the competition for the U.N. job -- the privilege of consuming American and other Western taxpayer dollars while sowing the seeds of U.N.-subsidized anti-Semitism. What he came up with was an essay he authored called "Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust," in which he compared the Israeli government to the Nazis.

"There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species," Falk opens the essay.

He then goes on to explain just how gruesome and barbaric the Holocaust was, to make sure the reader understands to what he is about to compare Ehud Olmert's government.

"Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not," Falk writes. "The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing" -- the Nazis were disturbing, but the Jews 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."

Falk laments how the world watched silently as the 1994 Rwandan genocide took place, as the 1995 Bosnian genocide happened, and again as the genocide unfolded in Darfur.

Though some two million people in the Darfur region of Sudan have been displaced and 450,000 have been killed since the atrocities began in 2003, "Gaza is morally far worse," Falk states.

"It is far worse because the international community is watching the ugly spectacle unfold while some of its most influential members actively encourage and assist Israel in its approach to Gaza," he writes.

And just to put it in perspective, Falk offers: "It is helpful to recall that the liberal democracies of Europe paid homage to Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games, and then turned away tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany."

Falk has left a paper trail of his journey from obscurity to subversive critic of Israel and the U.S. Unfortunately, that trail -- made up of columns contributed to various newspapers and magazines -- reveals a person who is at his best moments confused, and at his worst moments much, much worse.

For example, Falk displays an intriguing lack of knowledge about the targets of his invective in a January 2002 essay titled "Appraising the war against Afghanistan". He criticizes the administration of President George W. Bush for too broadly extending the brand of "terrorist" to include "groups" like Hamas and Hezbollah.

"These latter groups have neither ideologically nor tactically associated themselves with al-Qaeda and the visionary outlook of Osama bin Laden, and their struggles are much harder to categorize," he writes.

Yet, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have worked together, especially thanks to the late Imad Mugniyeh, who trained bin Laden. Not only is Hezbollah ideologically and tactically associated with al-Qaeda, but al-Qaeda actually modeled itself after Hezbollah -- it was a clone of the organization, or close to it.

He admits that Hamas has used "gruesome terrorist tactics" against Israeli civilians, but "the context has been one in which Israel has also used even more destructive tactics against Palestinian civilian society". More destructive and gruesome than suicide bombers and the kidnapping and torture of civilians -- both embraced by Hamas? We'll never know, because Falk doesn't give any examples.

He then states that Hamas and Hezbollah should be left intact, because to destroy them would deny the Palestinians their right to self-determination, and "should such groups be destroyed the effect would be to stabilize an oppressive Israeli occupation."

This is a point on which Falk has shed some valuable light, however. In a 2006 column he wrote for the Topeka Capital-Journal, Falk calls on the U.S. and Israel to engage in dialogue with Hamas. He complains that the U.S. and Europe insist on freezing Hamas out of the discussion "unless its leaders explicitly renounce terrorism, recognize Israel, accept all prior agreements between the Palestinians and Israel, and annul that part of the Hamas charter that calls for Israel's destruction."

This is unreasonable, he declares, because such devotion to terrorism and Israel's destruction is part of the genetic makeup of Hamas-led Palestinians. Take that away, and there's nothing left of Hamas.

"The chance of Hamas meeting these political conditions all at once is essentially nil since they amount to a renunciation of struggle and almost a declaration of surrender," he writes.

In other words, it's like telling the sun not to shine.

And the sun isn't shining, apparently, in the wilderness in which Falk wanders. He gives this away in his prescription for peace, published in The Nation in April 2002. Since only the Palestinians' violence is designated as terrorism, he writes, "Israel's greater violence" gets off scot-free.

"The point here is not in any way to excuse Palestinian suicide bombers and other violence against civilians, but to suggest that when a struggle over territory and statehood is being waged it can and should be resolved at the earliest possible point by negotiation and diplomacy, and that the violence on both sides tends toward the morally and legally impermissible," Falk writes.

To the casual observer living in the United Kingdom (or Waziristan, for that matter), that comment may seem erudite and reasonable -- a given. But in fact, as we know, the conflict is not about land or statehood, since the Palestinians have repeatedly refused any offer of land or statehood that wasn't prefaced by "From the river to the sea...."

Falk also wrote that the contention that Arafat resorted to terrorism is "seriously misleading." In fact, Falk writes, Arafat was the "moderate voice," dramatically fighting to protect Israeli civilians from attempted Palestinian terrorism; anyway, it was Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount "that started the second intifada."

Wild-eyed conspiracy theorists are usually interesting -- from a distance. But Falk doesn't keep his distance from such people, rather he keeps their company.

One of those characters is David Ray Griffin, who wrote a book called "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11". Though the book is a reinvention of the wheel, its sales riding the wave of earlier 9/11 conspiracy theorists, it was very important to Falk that this book be published. Falk helped find a publisher for it, and wrote the introduction to the book as well.

"As with Pearl Harbor there are ample reasons to receive news of massive attack with some skepticism," Falk writes in the introduction. "As with the difficulties of the Roosevelt presidency in rallying the country for war, here too, the neocon advisers shaping the foreign policy of the Bush Administration had been frustrated by their inability to mobilize the country for war. These prominent advisors had made no secret of their fervent wish for some sort of hostile attack of dramatic magnitude that would awaken the American people to their sense of the dangers of the post-cold war world, as well as of the opportunities for global domination, a vision of global empire that was openly embraced by neocon leading lights."

Falk accuses the media of ignoring the evidence, and the American public of resisting the truth. He explains that in Europe, clear-thinking people were immediately proposing "official complicity" in the attacks, but for some reason Americans just didn't get it. Of course, the "neocon leading lights" were primarily Jewish, pro-Israel advisors, so it's unclear if Zionist brainwashing was the cause of the public's ardent support for its country, its military, and its president immediately following 9/11.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, then, that Falk didn't face much competition; according to U.N. Watch, the Islamic and Arab states pressured the council leadership to list only Falk as a nominee for the post.

This is the new, "reformed" U.N. human rights body. It calls to mind what former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said about the U.N.'s efforts to build a new rights council from the same broken pieces and using the same shoddy workmanship as the last.

"We want a butterfly," Bolton said. "We don't intend to put lipstick on a caterpillar and call it a success."