This story might be a little more shocking if the official in question wasn’t Richard Falk, the UN Human Rights Council’s “Special Rapporteur”, who accused Israel of creating a new Holocaust and is a 9/11 Truther who claims the US government was complicit in the September 11 attacks.
How bad is Richard Falk? So bad that Human Rights Watch gave him the boot and the Palestinian Authority wanted him gone as a “partisan” of Hamas. To top off everything else he endorsed a Gilad Atzmon book. To put that into perspective, Gilad Atzmon has been shunned by most Palestinian groups because he hates Jews too much.
With a pedigree like that, it’s not surprising that when Falk put pen to paper to write about the Boston MarathonMassacre, this came out.
The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world. In some respects, the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink US relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East.
the somewhat hysterical Boston dragnet for the remaining at large and alive suspect does suggest that the wounds of 9/11 are far from healed.
Can we not expect one among our politicians, other than the Tea Party darling Rand Paul, to have the courage to connect some of these dots? Should we not all be meditating on W.H. Auden’s haunting line: “Those to whom evil is done/do evil in return”?
Aside from the tensions of the moment, self-scrutiny and mid-course reflections on America’s global role is long overdue. Such a process is crucial both for the sake of the country’s own future security and also in consideration of the wellbeing of others. Such adjustments will eventually come about either as a result of a voluntary process of self-reflection or through the force of unpleasant events. How and when this process of reassessment occurs remains a mystery.
Until it does, America’s military prowess and the abiding confidence of its leaders in hard power diplomacy makes the United States a menace to the world and to itself.