Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, is no stranger to controversy.
On the same day he released his final report to the United Nations that accused Israel of inhuman acts and apartheid, Falk told a crowd at Princeton University’s McCosh Hall that Palestinian nationalism is the “great symbolic struggle of our time.”
Falk was at Princeton Tuesday as the keynote speaker in the annual Edward W. Said Memorial lecture series, which honors the memory of the late Palestinian scholar and political activist.
Throughout the lecture, Falk drew comparisons between alleged Israeli abuses of human rights in the Palestinian territories with South African apartheid. Falk continued the narrative by comparing Said with lauded human rights advocate and South African President Nelson Mandela, as both believed that neither pure violence nor peaceful passiveness would result in a just solution.
“Said accepted the existence of Israel as a reality that Palestinians should not challenge,” said Falk, adding that Palestinians offered territorial concessions in 1988.
Falk outlined the evolution of Israel-Palestinian conflict from Said’s point of view. Said believed that while Palestinians should offer some concessions to Israel, the concessions should not be so trusting that an agreement sacrifices Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
He added that Said and many Palestinians became progressively more disillusioned over Palestine’s long struggle for statehood, because Israel allegedly refused to recognize Palestinian rights and accelerated violations of international law.
“However barbaric the Holocaust, it did not excuse the failing of justice for the Palestinian people, who were fully entitled to live on the land of historic Palestine,” Falk said...So let me get this straight, Dick. Palestinians should not challenge Israel's reality, yet they are fully entitled to live in "historic Palestine," i.e. Israel. How does that work, exactly?
We have come to expect such "subtle" and "nuanced" thinking--lies, more lies, old-fangled blood libels married to modern-day calumnies re "apartheid"--from the likes of Falk and Said (of whom the best that can be said is that he's dead). Even so, it doesn't make them any easier to take.
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