What the Falk?

“The pure products of America go crazy,” William Carlos Williams famously wrote. The point is well taken, at least with respect to Richard Falk, the retired Princeton professor and United Nations rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories. Mr. Falk went off the political deep end a long time ago—in a 1979 op-ed he predicted that “Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance"—and he has stayed that way ever since. More recently, he blamed the Boston Marathon bombings on the U.S. and Israel—or “American global domination” and “Tel Aviv,” as he put it in an online commentary.

His political lunacy has left Mr. Falk with few friends in respectable circles, but it has also helped him find a professional niche at the U.N. Human Rights Council. U.S. diplomats, time and again, have failed to remove him from his post—even after he came out as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist on his blog in January 2011.

Mr. Falk has also been a continuing source of embarrassment to Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. The trouble is that Mr. Ban is unable or unwilling to do anything about his Falk problem. Urged by U.N. Watch and others to condemn Mr. Falk’s vicious, anti-Semitic take on the Boston terror attacks, Mr. Ban shirked: “Richard Falk is an independent expert,” U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said in a statement today. “The Secretary-General did not appoint him and is not responsible for his views, which he has criticized in the past. Mr. Falk reports to the Human Rights Council, which is comprised of different member states.”

Are there no adults left at Turtle Bay?

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