Home | Friday 18th April 2008 | Issue 629

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LOOK WHO'S FALKING

The United Nations (remember them? They’re the ones who come up with great sounding rhetoric and resolutions about human rights, freedom and the equality of mankind, and whom everyone then ignores) have been ruffling a few Israeli feathers of late. The current UN Human Rights Council investigator into the systematic Israeli oppression of Palestine (see SchNEWS 627) has been fairly ‘withering’ about it (according to the pull-all-their-punches BBC) – but the next man lined up to take the job, Professor Richard Falk, has gone the whole hog and (quite rightly) drawn the obvious parallels with those-who-must-never-be mentioned, the Nazis.

In an essay published last year, he said that Israel was creating a “Holocaust in the making” in Gaza and foreign governments should be intervening. Of course, these words are not so different from those of Israeli deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, who back in February threatened the Palestinians with a ‘bigger holocaust.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, his comments have gone down like a damaged helicopter gunship with the Israeli state, who say they will ban him from entering the country unless the UN change his mandate (due for review in September) to also investigate Palestinian human rights violations (or presumably ditch him and install someone more friendly).

But, himself an American Jew, Falk walks the talk and has stuck to his guns, pointing out that if his comments has been about the way “China was dealing with Tibet or the Sudanese government was dealing with Darfur, I think there would be no reluctance to make that comparison”, and that the problem was really the historical sensitivity of the Jewish people, and Israel’s tactic of using this to avoid having their policies held up to international law and morality.

Will the UN bottle it and give the job to someone else? Will Falk be the fall guy? Watch this space...

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