By Ed Lasky

By Joseph Klein
 

Richard Falk, who justly earned his way into David Horowitz’s book The Professors as one of the “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” now lectures more august audiences at the United Nations. Appointed as the United Nations Human Rights Council to serve as its special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories in March, Falk has in a matter of months lived down to his opponents’ worst expectations. In addition to The Professors, Falk should be added to a list of the most biased anti-Israel UN human rights investigators, not an easy list to make at the UN. He believes Israel, and the United States, are guilty of Nazi-like barbarism, which the United Nations decries even as it dismisses investigations into North Korea and Cuba. Falk would abolish the alleged democratic atrocities by establishing a “world government” in which foreigners could overturn U.S. policies through “binding referenda.”

Falk not only hates Israel but his own country. Falk has accused the United States of imperialism, Nazi-like tendencies, and possibly manufacturing the official story-line for what happened on 9/11. He has referred to the nation in recent years as slipping toward “fascism.” Falk views the democratically elected governments of the United States as no better than the world’s most notorious dictatorships.

He has a plan to make sure Nazism never breaks out again: allowing foreigners to veto the American voter.

Falk is a strong advocate for “world government” and “global law.” The United Nations General Assembly, in his view, does not have enough power to legislate and enforce its decisions. He suggests the possibility of forming a Global Parliament, either operating as a subsidiary organ of the UN General Assembly or taking some more autonomous character within the UN system.” He has recommended consideration of “allowing persons outside the United States to challenge policy affecting their wellbeing by way of binding referenda or even by casting votes in national elections held within the United States.”[1]

Falk donated $500 to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

In the small area over which he exercises authority, Israel and Palestine, he has managed to follow through on his twisted ideology. Falk has long despised and maligned the State of Israel. Last year, before his UN appointment, Falk wrote a widely circulated article entitled “Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” attempting to lend an aura of academic legitimacy to the outrageous charge that Israel is employing Nazi-like practices in the Palestinian territories. Falk has also in the past charged Israel with “genocidal tendencies.” Falk, although a Jew himself, loves using such Nazi comparisons to delegitimize the moral basis for Israel’s right to continue to exist as an independent Jewish state. UN Ambassador John Bolton warned against his appointment. However, in April, the notorious National Lawyers Guild urged Israel to cooperate with his “investigation” into its “horrendous” human rights record.

In any rational process of selection, such inflammatory language would disqualify the person holding such views from a job that should demand objectivity and impartiality. At the United Nations, however, Falk was selected precisely because this Israel-hater has already pre-judged Israel guilty.

And he has not disappointed his handlers.

His initial report, issued in August 2008 and summarized in a statement that Falk delivered to a General Assembly committee last week, repeats the fabricated narrative of the victimization of Palestine at the hands of Israel. In his report, Falk criticized Israeli roadblocks and the security fence built between Israel and the West Bank without acknowledging that they were done as last resort measures in response to the stream of Palestinian terrorists infiltrating into Israeli population centers and setting off their suicide bombs. Falk also failed to note the recent removal of various roadblocks in the West Bank and the opening of intersections adjacent to Hebron and Shavei Shomron for Palestinian traffic. Falk does not want to admit the obvious: as Palestinians begin to demonstrate that they are moving away from terrorism against Israeli civilians, Israel will be willing to lower the barriers to their freedom of travel.

Falk blamed Israel for the health conditions in the West Bank and Gaza without acknowledging that Israel has granted permission for tens of thousands of Palestinians to enter Israel for medical treatment, despite the risk of terrorist infiltration. He condemned restrictions on access of goods to Gaza without acknowledging the vast amount of arms smuggled into Gaza that prompted those restrictions.

Falk has portrayed Hamas simply as “a concerned government…administering the Gaza Strip” ever since it “took over the administrative control in Mid June 2007.” He makes Hamas appear as if it were a peaceful bureaucracy trying to govern under impossible conditions not of its own making. Missing entirely is the litany of terrorist acts committed by Hamas, not only against Israeli citizens, but also fellow Palestinians belonging to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party.

In short, Falk has exonerated Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups of any moral or legal responsibility for their violence, which is aimed deliberately at Israel’s most vulnerable citizens including its children, and against Palestinians who are willing to negotiate with Israel on terms that recognize the Jewish State’s right to exist.

In Falk’s twisted world, the terrorists are doing no more than exercising their “right to resist.”

Instead, he has blamed everything on Israel, claiming that Israel’s self-protective measures to stamp out terrorism at its source are “gross violations of the Geneva Conventions.”

Back in 2005, Falk wrote an article calling Israel’s unilateral decision to withdraw from Gaza a “gigantic exercise in diversionary politics.” In his role as special rapporteur, Falk has continued to view Gaza as if it were still territory under Israeli occupation rather than the failed experiment in Palestinian self-determination that it turned into after Israel handed control of Gaza over to the Palestinians in 2005. As Israel’s response to Falk’s report points out, “if Israel genuinely exercised effective control over Gaza, it would have been able to effectively act against the thousands of rocket attacks on Israel proper launched from Gaza since 2005; it would have prevented the hostile incitement to violence and hatred, and would have been able to effectively prevent the smuggling of arms, weapons, and terrorists to Gaza.”

The “occupying power” in Gaza today is Hamas, whose terrorist army in civilian clothes uses its own people as human shields and conscripts Palestinian women and children as suicide bombers. Hamas is violating the human rights of the Palestinian people as well as of Israeli civilians whom it targets for murder. It is Hamas who is committing the gross violations of the Geneva Conventions that Falk tries to lay at Israel’s door.

Falk also said it does not matter that Hamas continues to reject even the most minimal conditions for a truly peaceful solution that the international community has embraced – recognition of Israel’s right to exist, affirmation of past agreements with the Palestine Authority and renunciation of terrorism. UN money should flow to Gaza, no matter what, he believes. His thesis is that Israel has no right to expect any assurances of security for its people because “oppressors” are not entitled to any peace without “justice” for their “victims.”

Falk completely ignored the fact that Hamas’ leaders continue to call for the total destruction of the state of Israel. They use any truce (known as hudna in Arabic) as a lull during which Hamas builds up its military strength for future attacks on Israeli civilians, not as a time for meaningful negotiations with Israel for a viable two-state solution.

A co-founder of Hamas, Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, admitted as much several years ago when he characterized a hudna that he offered in return for complete Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories as the first stage on the path “to liberate all our land.” As he put it, “the hudna would however not signal a recognition of the state of Israel.”Even the complete destruction of the Israeli state was not enough for this Hamas leader. Rantissi, a Holocaust denier, was quoted by the Chicago Tribune in 2002 as saying, “We will kill Jews everywhere. There will be no security for any Jews, those who came from America, Russia or anywhere.” Fortunately, Israeli forces managed to target and kill Rantissi, without causing any collateral civilian casualties, before he got the opportunity to commit a Holocaust of his own against all of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel. Yet Falk has condemned such assassinations of avowed terrorists as illegal “extrajudicial executions.”

The United Nations has given this ideologue a prominent forum, by virtue of Falk’s role as special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, to single out Israel for demonization. That is what the United Nations knows how to do best. In fact, the UN abolished the mandates of special rapporteurs charged with investigating real human rights violations in countries such as Cuba and North Korea so that it can concentrate even more on Israel.

Richard Falk’s own selection as the UN’s special rapporteur is a living example of how dysfunctional a world organization can be, inverting moral reality by persecuting the innocent. Falk is the perfect example of the UN’s moral depravity and the dangers of global governance.

By SOL STERN

One of the most misleading statements during the presidential debates was when Barack Obama claimed that William Ayers was just "a guy in the neighborhood."

But that piece of spin is nothing compared to the false story now being peddled by Mr. Obama’s media supporters that Mr. Ayers — who worked with the Democratic nominee for years to disperse education grants through a group called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — has redeemed his terrorist past. In the New York Times, for example, Frank Rich writes that "establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform."

David G. Klein

I’ve studied Mr. Ayers’s work for years and read most of his books. His hatred of America is as virulent as when he planted a bomb at the Pentagon. And this hatred informs his educational "reform" efforts. Of course, Mr. Obama isn’t going to appoint him to run the education department. But the media mainstreaming of a figure like Mr. Ayers could have terrible consequences for the country’s politics and public schools.

The education career of William Ayers began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College at the age of 40. He planned to stay long enough to get a teaching credential. But he experienced an epiphany in a course offered by Maxine Greene, who urged future teachers to tell children about the evils of the existing, oppressive capitalist social order. In her essay "In Search of a Critical Pedagogy," for example, Ms. Greene wrote of an education that would portray "homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice."

That was music to the ears of the ex-Weatherman. Mr. Ayers acquired a doctorate in education and landed an Ed school appointment at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

Chicago might seem to be the least likely place for Mr. Ayers to regain social respectability for himself and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. After all, the Windy City was where their Weathermen period began in 1969, with Mr. Ayers, Ms. Dohrn and their comrades marauding through the Miracle Mile, assaulting cops and city officials and promulgating slogans such as "Kill Your Parents."

But Chicago’s political culture had already begun to change by the time the couple returned in 1987. And the city would change even more dramatically when Richard Daley Jr. became mayor in 1990.

Daley the son has maintained as tight a rein over the city’s Democratic Party machine as did his father, doling out patronage jobs and contracts to loyalists and tolerating as much corruption as in the old days. But unlike his father, he was ready to cut deals with veterans of the hard-core, radical left who were working for their revolutionary ideas from within the system they once sought to destroy from without. There is no lack of such veterans. One of Chicago’s congressmen, Bobby Rush, is a former chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party; Louis Gutierrez, a former leader of a Puerto Rican liberation group, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, is another.

In this Chicago, where there are no enemies on the left, Mr. Ayers’s second career flourished. It didn’t hurt that his father, Thomas Ayers, was the CEO of the Commonwealth Edison company, a friend of both Daleys and a major power broker in the city.

Mr. Ayers was hired by the Chicago public schools to train teachers, and played a leading role in the $160 million Annenberg Challenge grant that distributed funds to a host of so-called school-reform projects, including some social-justice themed schools and schools organized by Acorn. Barack Obama became the first chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge organization in 1995. When asked for an opinion on the Obama/Ayers connection, Mayor Daley told the New York Times that Mr. Ayers had "done a lot of good in this city and nationally."

In fact, as one of the leaders of a movement for bringing radical social-justice teaching into our public school classrooms, Mr. Ayers is not a school reformer. He is a school destroyer.

He still hopes for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism, but this time around Mr. Ayers sows the seeds of resistance and rebellion in America’s future teachers. Thus, education students signing up for a course Mr. Ayers teaches at UIC, "On Urban Education," can read these exhortations from the course description: "Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression — we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things. We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine."

The readings Mr. Ayers assigns to his university students are as intellectually diverse as a political commissar’s indoctrination session in one of his favorite communist tyrannies. The list for his urban education course includes the bible of the critical pedagogy movement, Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire’s "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"; two books by Mr. Ayers himself; and "Teaching to Transgress" by bell hooks (lower case), the radical black feminist writer.

Two years ago Mr. Ayers shared with his students a letter he wrote to a young radical friend: "I’ve been told to grow up from the time I was ten until this morning. Bullshit. Anyone who salutes your ‘youthful idealism’ is a patronizing reactionary. Resist! Don’t grow up! I went to Camp Casey [Cindy Sheehan’s vigil at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas] in August precisely because I’m an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out." (The letter is on his Web site, www.billayers.org.)

America’s ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy. Mr. Ayers has tried to give the civic culture ideal a coup de grace, contemptuously dismissing it as nothing more than what the critical pedagogy theorists commonly refer to as "capitalist hegemony."

In the world of the Ed schools, Mr. Ayers’s movement has established a sizeable beachhead — witness his election earlier this year as vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of education professors and researchers.

If Barack Obama wins on Nov. 4, the "guy in the neighborhood" is not likely to get an invitation to the Lincoln bedroom. But with the Democrats controlling all three branches of government, there’s a real danger that Mr. Ayers’s social-justice movement in the schools will get even more room to maneuver and grow.