Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
23 October '10
Now, I know that it is no surprise that Richard Falk –United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights since 2008 — has come out with yet more hysterical bile against the State of Israel. This is a man, after all, who in a 2007 article entitled, Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust, said the following: “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not”.
In fact he’s said many things like that. He also continues to flirt with 9/11 conspiracy theories along the lines that it was all a plot cooked up by “neo-cons” in the White House. In other words, he’s got all the qualifications you might expect for a senior role with the United Nations Human Rights Council, and to be treated as a credible source for the BBC about problems in the peace process.
So much for Richard Falk. Now bring on the BBC’s UN Correspondent, Barbara Plett — whose laudatory story about Falk’s report yesterday to the UN General Assembly on Israeli settlements and the need for boycotts is today splashed all over the BBC website. (By the way, does the name Barbara Plett ring any bells? It was Plett, some may recall, who in 2004 admitted on air that she had burst into tears at the sight of the terminally ill Yaser Arafat being helicoptered out of his compound on the West Bank).
Obviously, then, the story makes no mention whatsoever of Falk’s Nazi-Israel comparisons or of his stance on 9/11. To do that would be totally to destroy his credibility and, with it, his message to an uninitiated, non-Israeli and non-Jewish audience that for the most part will never have heard of him before and can reasonably be expected to see him as a UN official who is simply doing his job.
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