The UN's conspiracy crank

David Aaronovitch has an excellent piece today in The Times about the appointment by the UN Human Rights Council of Professor Richard Falk to investigate violations of human rights by Israel. Falk has already declared his hand in advance of his investigation. Last week he confirmed to the BBC that he believed Israeli actions in Gaza were comparable to the conduct of Nazi Germany. As David observes, the man is not a UN "expert" so much as a conspiracy crank.

Like David, I believe in the UN. Objections to Professor Falk's role ought not to be left only to a particular cast of pro-Israel campaigner that sees only malevolence in UN designs. This appointment is worse than a disgrace: it is manifestly absurd when judged by the purposes of advancing liberal-democratic internationalism. It makes sense only in the context that David describes:

"The implication of this logic is simple. The UN Human Rights Council doesn't give a toss about the human rights of the Palestinians in the sense of wanting them upheld. Its majority is far more interested in using Israel as a stick to beat the US with, or - in the case of Islamic states - as a bogeyman to dampen down domestic discontent."

I make two additional observations about Falk. First, it is certainly right to describe Falk as a conspiracy crank. David refers to Falk's expressed admiration for the 9/11 "truth" polemics of a theologian called David Ray Griffin. In his own book, The Great Terror War, 2003, Falk is not obscure in what he wishes to say about 9/11. He opens (pp. 1-3) with a section entitled "Echoes of Pearl Harbor?"; note the artful question mark, which neatly insinuates the conspiracy theory that guides Falk's treatment of 9/11. Falk comments:

"The American public has never looked back to examine the evidence that has raised serious doubts among respected historians about the surprise nature of the attack, suggesting that the pro-war forces gathered around FDR had convincing advance knowledge that a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in the offing, but chose to ignore such warning. Historians continue to quarrel over whether this dynamic was part of a deliberate plan to lure the country into World War II or whether it represented some sort of bureaucratic snafu at higher levels of government of such gigantic proportions as to be barely credible."

I will postpone till another time a consideration of the historical illiteracy that is Falk's treatment of US entry into WWII. I note here merely that Falk echoes exactly the conceit of the 9/11 conspiracy nutters (the notion has since been advanced at length in David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11; the book carries a foreword, to his own disgrace and the embarrassment of Labour supporters, by the former minister Michael Meacher). Falk says (p. 2) that: "There is nothing comparable [in his remarks about Pearl Harbor] to this great Terror War." But what he means by that is that the war on Islamist terror has unfortunately not provoked public opposition on the scale of the opposition to WWII. He comments wistfully: "At least in the 1940s there was a certain ambivalence about recourse to war associated with strong isolationist sentiments that enjoyed significant backing in the Congress and the grassroots, especially in the Midwest."

My second observation concerns an op-ed Falk wrote for the New York Times on 16 February 1979. I have it in front of me. 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. Incidentally, the authorial by-line to his NYT article states that Falk "recently visited the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini [in exile] in France". It doesn't give the name of Falk's travelling companion, but this was – bien sûr – the former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark. Clark, as Ian Williams pointed out in an illuminating piece some years ago in Salon, is "the war criminal's best friend". I recommend you follow that link, and also read this piece by Christopher Hitchens, to see what that description entails. I acknowledge that my readers will consider this an extreme claim, but I consider that Ramsey Clark's enthusiasm for mass murderers and despots exceeds even that of anyone else called Clark.

Comments

[MJE]

It seems the UN Human Rights Council have done it again in appointing Richard Falk. Along with Mr Falk, they recently appointed Jean Ziegler by 40 votes to 7.

Ziegler had 'total support' for Castro's revolution in Cuba, even after he started elminiating opponents and locking up jornalists.

And Ziegler has a bit off a soft-spot for Robert Mugabe, claiming he 'has history and morality with him'. Of course he does.

Alongside visiting Saddam Hussein, Kim Il-Sung, calling the US an 'imperialist dictatorship', supporting Ethiopian dictator Mengistu, and calls the Israeli occupation of the West Bank 'the worst in the history of colonialism.'

And now we have this Falk bloke too on the UN HRC. Lunatics taking over the asylum, or something like that.

[Neil]

Speaking of conspiracy cranks (and the excellent 9/11 myth debunking blog Screw Loose Change had a piece about Falk a couple of weeks ago) did you see the interview with Robert Fisk that appeared in The Observer on Sunday? He said Ahmadinejad was so bad he might as well work for the Israelis, and "perhaps he does."

Oh dear.

[Snorri Godhi]

"Ramsey Clark's enthusiasm for mass murderers and despots exceeds even that of anyone else called Clark."

OK, but does it exceed the enthusiasm for the same shown by G.B. Shaw and Noam Chomsky?

[Stephen Fox]

'Falk complains: "President Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski [Carter's National Security Adviser] have until very recently associated [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism".'
Wow. Here is a man for whom even the mealymouthed appeasers Carter and Brzezinski are secular fundamentalists.
It's a scary world out there...

Slightly off topic but Neil, I gathered from the link to that interview with Fisk that he refers to himself in the third person as 'Mr Bob', and asks people if they have 'read any Fisk'. That was as far as I needed to go, and I salute your bravery in venturing so much further into the matter.