The UN's favourite conspiracy theorist

What price a U.N. expert? the United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed a new "investigator" into the conduct of Israel, Professor Richard Falk. However, it seems that the Professor will not need to do much investigating, as he already has a fully formed view: in his estimation, the Israel is comparable with Nazi Germany:

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. 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. If ever the ethos of ‘a responsibility to protect,’ recently adopted by the UN Security Council as the basis of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from further pain and suffering. But it would be unrealistic to expect the UN to do anything in the face of this crisis, given the pattern of US support for Israel and taking into account the extent to which European governments have lent their weight to recent illicit efforts to crush Hamas as a Palestinian political force.

None of this conveys any understanding that Hamas may in fact be the problem, inasmuch as Israel is under constant bombardment from Hamas missiles fired from Gaza, often from within civilian residential areas. But still, however outrageous Falk's demonisation of Israel may be, it is not as unusual as it ought to be these days. Some of Falk's views are stranger by half. Oliver Kamm comments on a piece by Falk in the New York Times of 16th February 1979:

The title is "Trusting Khomeini". It is a credit to the sub-editors of the NYT that they managed to encapsulate in just two words what Falk's article is about, though perhaps a better participle would have been "lauding". Falk complains: "President Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski [Carter's National Security Adviser] have until very recently associated [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism. The news media have defamed him in many ways, associating him with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti-Semitism, and with a new political disorder, 'theocratic fascism,' about to be set loose on the world."

Well, fancy that. Falk knows better, however, insisting that "the depiction of [Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false". On the contrary: "Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country."

I need make no comment on this beyond the fact that Falk is an extreme example of (in the literary critic Lionel Trilling's phrase) the adversary culture: a man so bitter about the failings (not all of them imagined) of liberal democracies that he will perceive salvation even in the most reactionary and despotic of movements overseas.

As if this were not enough, the Professor is effectively a card-carrying supporter of one of the barmiest of current conspiracy theories: the "9-11 Truth" lobby:

On March 26, Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, was named by unanimous vote to a newly created position to report on human rights in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. While Mr. Falk's specialty is human rights and international law, since the attacks in 2001, he has devoted some of his time to challenging what he calls the "9-11 official version."

On March 24 in an interview with a radio host and former University of Wisconsin instructor, Kevin Barrett, Mr. Falk said, "It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don't think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess."

Mr. Barrett, who is the co-founder of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, said in an interview yesterday of Mr. Falk, "I would put him on a list of scholars who are sympathetic to the 9/11 truth movement."

He added, "Unlike most public intellectuals today, he is both honest and very, very knowledgeable in that he understands the probable reality of 9/11. He understands that the evidence that it was a false flag operation is very strong."

The narrative that the attacks from 2001 were a "false flag" operation is a recurring theme in the literature challenging the consensus that 19 Al Qaeda hijackers flew commercial jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. False flag refers to espionage or covert actions taken by one government made to seem like the work of another. The false flag thesis has it that the Bush administration is somehow responsible for the September 11 attacks as a pretext for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Falk yesterday did not return e-mails and phone calls asking for a comment. But in 2004 he wrote the foreword to the book "The New Pearl Harbor," by David Ray Griffin. Mr. Griffin has posited that such an inside job is the likely explanation for the attacks.

In the preface, Mr. Falk writes, "There have been questions raised here and there and allegations of official complicity made almost from the day of the attacks, especially in Europe, but no one until Griffin has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account."

When asked for a comment about the appointment of Mr. Falk, a former American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton said, "This is exactly why we voted against the new human rights council."

This last comment is hardly surprising. What are we to make of a Human Rights Council which appoints a man to a senior role who has allied himself not only with the theocratic fascist regime of the Ayatollah's, but also with the loopy conspiracy-theorists of fringe American politics. David Aaronovitch cites the only reasonable conclusion:

I believe in the UN, but we all must stop regarding it as though it was some kind of moral arbiter, doing right in a world of wrong. Because, unfortunately, the term “UN expert” means neither good nor expert. It can mean warped and stupid.

Indeed it can. The absurd ravings of a left-wing extremist are one thing when the individual is concerned is a private system. The appointment of such an individual to an important U.N. post can only diminish the organisation as a whole, in the eyes of right-thinking people. The problem is that too few right-thinking people are associated with the United Nations. Far from being a friend of democracy and human rights, the U.N. is little more than a mouthpiece for whichever group of nations can gain a majority in the General Assembly at any given time. The United Nations is in no position to claim special moral authority on this or any issue.