Feb.7 2012
GENEVA – Seventy years ago, President Roosevelt coined a term for the global alliance against Hitlerism, which resonated at once with Churchill: United Nations.

Endorsed by 26 states on January 1, 1942, the Declaration by United Nations made history by elevating human rights and religious freedom as international principles, and pledged a common struggle against “savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world.”

By 1945, as war-making gave way to peace-preserving, the alliance developed into the colossal world instrument we know today.

Seven decades later, how does the UN live up to the vision and resolve of its founders?

An event this evening at Stanford University is a sobering reminder that some of what is said and done today in the name of the UN would cause Roosevelt and Churchill to roll in their graves.

The human rights clinic of the law faculty, headed by Professor James Cavallaro, a former Human Rights Watch activist, has decided to give its platform, in the form of a public lecture and reception, to Richard Falk, a UN expert and former Princeton academic.

While he appears highly qualified and is well versed in the language of human rights, the reality is that Falk’s twisted moral vision negates the UN founders’ dream, recasting tyrants, terrorists and teachers of hatred as heroic victims resisting colonialist oppression.

As the world focuses on Iran’s mad race for a nuclear bomb, and its brutal repression of peaceful student activists, Stanford’s human right scholars ought to recall that Falk was a key promoter of the regime’s establishment.

Days after Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in 1979, 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.”

In response, the Times’ Anthony Lewis called Falk’s assurances “outstandingly silly.” Yet folly carries a price, and legions of Iranian men and women—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 precursor was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt—into a travesty.

In 2008, after Falk claimed Israel was planning a “Palestinian Holocaust,” Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and other dictatorships installed him as the council’s monitor on Palestine.

His mission is so biased that Falk tries to obscure it. He calls himself, as does the Stanford ad, the Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories,” implying a regional jurisdiction examining all sides. Yet his actual mandate is to investigate “Israel’s violations.” Not Hamas, not Fatah, not Islamic Jihad—only Israel.

Third, Falk uses his UN post to legitimize Hamas, ignoring its brutalization of fellow Palestinians, rocketing of Israeli civilians and incitement to genocidal murder of Jews.

Falk’s reports whitewash Hamas as the “elected government” of Gaza—never mind that it seized power by throwing opponents off rooftops.

His backing of the terrorist group is so extreme that even the Palestinian Authority urged his removal, viewing him as a “partisan of Hamas.”

Fourth, Falk recently published a cartoon showing a dog, with “U.S.A.” written on its body and wearing a Jewish headcover, devouring a bloody skeleton and urinating on a female figure symbolizing justice.

UN rights chief Navi Pillay found the posting “anti-Semitic” and “objectionable.” Falk was condemned by British Prime Minister David Cameron and many others.

Eventually Falk apologized, claiming it was an error, but only after he initially denied doing anything wrong.

Last but not least, Falk is one of the world’s top 9/11 conspiracy theorists, endorsing those who accuse the U.S. government of orchestrating the destruction of the Twin Towers as a pretext to launch wars.

Falk promotes the writings of David Ray Griffin, his disciple and close friend who produced 12 books describing the World Trade Center attack as “an inside job.”

Not only did Falk contribute the Foreword to Griffin’s 2004 “The New Pearl Harbor”—praising the author’s “fortitude,” “courage,” and “intelligence”—but Griffin credits Falk for getting the book published.

Falk has repeatedly appeared on the “TruthJihad.com” show of Kevin Barrett, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and Holocaust skeptic, endorsing Barrett’s “good work,” and praising Iranian tyrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Last January, in an unprecedented reprimand, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon took the floor of the Human Rights Council to decry Falk’s 9/11 theories as “preposterous” and “an affront to the memory of the more than 3,000 people who died in that tragic terrorist attack.”

Likewise, U.S. ambassador Susan Rice has called Falk’s 9/11 remarks “despicable.” His “distasteful sideshow,” she said, harms the cause of human rights.

Falk’s sideshow also harms the cause of the UN. If the world body’s greatest defenders can see that, so should Stanford Law School.

The author is the executive director of UN Watch.
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