Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Should McGill Balk at a Falk Talk?

Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, and a McGill grad, gives five reasons why the (Richard) Falk talk should be nixed:
First, Falk was an energetic campaigner for Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, both before and after the 1979 revolution. Days after the cleric arrived in Tehran to seize power, Falk reassured the world, in a New York Times op-ed titled “Trusting Khomeini,” that “the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.”
Khomeini’s entourage, wrote Falk, had “a notable record of concern for human rights.” Indeed, the ayatollah’s “new model of popular revolution” offered the world “a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.”
Only a month later, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called Falk’s assurances “outstandingly silly.” Yet in world politics, folly carries a price, and legions of Iranians — brutalized, tortured and raped by the Islamic Republic — continue to pay it.
Second, Falk is one of the figures responsible for turning the UN Human Rights Council — whose predecessor body Humphrey helped found — into a travesty.
In 2008, shortly after Falk accused Israel of planning a “Palestinian Holocaust,” a bloc of dictatorships, including Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, installed him as the council’s expert on Palestine.
The mission they gave him is so biased in its formulation, that Falk tries to obscure it. He calls himself the Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories,” implying a regional jurisdiction that objectively treats all actions and parties. Yet his actual mandate is to investigate “Israel’s violations.” Not Hamas, not Fatah, not Islamic Jihad – just Israel.
When I attended McGill’s law faculty, the entrance was memorably engraved with the words “Audi alteram partem,” which stands for the natural justice obligation to hear both sides. Falk’s UN mission, created by tyrants and fully endorsed by him, stands for the opposite.
Third, Falk uses his UN post to legitimize Hamas, systematically ignoring its open incitement to genocidal murder of Jews and the deliberate targeting of civilians.
Falk takes pains to portray Hamas as “the elected government” of Gaza – never mind that that the group seized power by throwing opponents off rooftops and shooting them in hospital beds. He speaks of a personal mission “to describe the actuality of Hamas’s position on contested issues.”
Falk’s support for the terrorist group is so extreme that even the Palestinian Authority – as revealed in a Wikleaks cable, and which Falk himself admits – has sought to remove him, on grounds that he is a “partisan of Hamas.”
Fourth, in July Falk published a cartoon showing a dog, with “USA” written on its body and wearing a skullcap marked with a Star of David, urinating on a depiction of justice while it devours a bloody skeleton.
Falk was globally censured. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay found the posting “anti-Semitic” and “objectionable” and Falk was strongly condemned by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.
Fifth, Falk is one of the world’s most high-profile 9/11 conspiracy theorists, lending his name to those who accuse the U.S. government of orchestrating the destruction of the Twin Towers as a pretext to launch wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In particular, Falk actively promotes the writings of David Ray Griffin, a disciple and close friend, who has produced 12 books describing the World Trade Center attack as “an inside job.”
No doubt about it: Falk is a rotter and a scoundrel. And yet we must remind ourselves how this free speech business works--i.e. if we want our voices to be heard, we must allow those whose speech we deplore to speak, too. Not that's there's any equivalence, but if we want the Steyns and Coulters to be able to speak on campus, we cannot, knee-jerkily, demand that the Falks be silenced.

Also--maybe his appearance will inspire someone in the audience to embark on a study of what makes Quisling Jews like Falk--ones whose Zionhass is often pathological and always ugly--tick.

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