The Campaign to Equate Israel with the Nazis: Enter Richard Falk, UN Special Investigator

Veteran anti-Israel activist Richard Falk has been named by the UN Human Rights Council as Special Investigator of Israeli Actions, replacing veteran anti-Israel rapporteur John Dugard. Falk has equated Israel with the Nazis, stating, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.” He is also an apologist for Hamas, writing in the same piece where he accused Israel of “genocidal potential” towards the Palestinians, that

Hamas was castigated as a terrorist organization that had not renounced violence against Israel and had refused to recognize the Jewish state as a legitimate political entity. In fact, the behavior and outlook of Hamas is quite different.

The shameless Falk recently plugged the Palestinian propaganda film “Occupation 101,” in which he was prominently featured, asserting,

What I was particularly struck by was that there was not a false note in the entire film.

He apparently missed his own wildly inaccurate statements including the false claim that Israel “receives as much foreign economic assistance as all the countries combined in the world” from the US. In truth, as CAMERA documented in its review of the film, “Occupation 101” is a compendium of falsehoods and canards that incite hatred of Israel and Jews in general.

With his long record of gross misjudgement, the professor will be an ideal choice for the committee which spends nearly all its time condemning Israel while ignoring massive human rights violations in places like Sudan and Tibet. In 1979, he published a piece in the New York Times titled “Trusting Khomeini,” extolling Ayatollah Khomeini, and ridiculing the notion that the Ayatollah was a religious reactionary. On the very day his piece appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times (Feb. 16, 1979), the first batch of officials from the prior Iranian government were sentenced to death by the new Islamist regime.

Falk possesses impeccable bonafides as the rapporteur for the anti-Israel organization. In February 2002, as the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign was approaching its apex, he published an article with the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Research condemning the

asymmetric war being waged by Israel under Sharon’s militant leadership against an essentially defenseless Palestinian society.

Falk’s appointment may be a signal that the UN Human Rights Commission is kicking into high gear in its campaign to demonize the state of Israel. After all, the next Durban conference is only a year away. The media, thus far, has not given this appointment the attention it deserves.