March 31, 2008
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) stooped to an all time anti-Israel low with the appointment of Richard Falk as investigator on Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories. Not only has he likened Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis and accused the Jewish state of genocidal tendencies but he has the added advantage of also being Jewish. In addition he is a professor of international law at Princeton University.
Falk is set to replace South African anti-Apartheid lawyer John Dugard, who has held the job for the past 7 years. Dugard was notorious for his assertion that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza resembles Apartheid. More recently he defended Palestinian use of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians as a legitimate form of resistance. How one wonders could the UNHRC have ever have found a worse candidate. But with Falk they have outdone themselves. The only more hurtful analogy for Israel than Apartheid is comparing it to Nazi Germany and Falk is a champion of this libel.
Last year in an article, Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust, written at the request of the Turkish daily newspaper ZAMAN, Falk clearly articulates his extreme anti-Israel views. He begins by explaining why the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species and then goes on to ask whether, given this, it is an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? His answer is an emphatic no. He writes
‘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.’
