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 the Iranian government’s mad race for a nuclear bomb, and its brutal repression of peaceful student activists, Stanford’s human rights scholars ought to recall that Falk was a key promoter of this 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.”
More at UN Watch
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