Don’t ever send a college professor to do a man’s job. The United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed Richard Falk Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories. There is no special ‘rapporteur’ for Israel. Falk will replace John Dugant of South Africa. It’s a six-year term. Falk is not a friend of Israel…or of the Bush administration…or of Capitalism…and more recently of the 9/11 Commission. He is beginning to think it was an inside job.

Falk was an ardent admirer of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. He is closer to Jimmy Carter on Israel and to Rosie O’Donnell on his knowledge of structural steel than most college professors. As for his investigative powers no one would mistake him for that other Falk, Peter—TV’s famous Colombo—but investigating he will go. Colombo had an open searching mind; Professor Falk made up his mind on the Middle East 30 years ago and the road he has taken ends in Mecca, not in Paul’s Damascus. If the Human Rights Council was actually concerned with human rights and wanted to send a first-class rapporteur to the Middle East it would have chosen someone else, not a college professor who has piddled away three decades trying to prove Yasser Arafat and the PLO the moral equivalents of George Washington and the Continental Army—a college professor less burdened with his own self-importance who just might know the difference between a madrassas and the Boy Scouts of America. Colombo might have been a bit unkempt but he kept an open mind; he cleared out the rubbish every few days to make room for new insights. Richard Falk has let the debris of 30 years of misinformation collect.

By the way…incidentally…and another thing…

Falk is to investigate “Israel’s violations of the principles and bases of international law.” He will not investigate Palestinian violations. Does this scenario have a precedent? Has anything like this ever happened before? Well, sure. One can picture Der Fuhrer assigning Julius Streicher to investigate Jewish transgressions of the Aryan supremacy laws. Of course Streicher strode about Berlin with a whip in his hand. Falk will not be that obvious. He prefers mortarboards, Doctorates and long-winded dissertations to riding crops, boots and jodhpurs. Hamas will take care of the rough stuff.

No one can accuse Falk of being an anti-Semite. “It is especially painful for me,” he says, “as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust.””

Then why does he persist in doing so? He’s a college professor. There are other words he can use. How about Jihad? How about Risorgimento? How about struggle? How about self-preservation? They are more accurate than holocaust. A perceptive college professor should be able to transcend morel equivalency. He should be able to do better than Jimmy Carter and Diane Finestein. It’s amazing what 30 years in academia can do to a relatively intelligent man’s grasp on reality.

Metaphor or no metaphor, Falk has compared Israeli actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis and he stands resolutely behind his comments. But he is a college professor and one would expect him to have some familiarity with Oradour Sur Glane and Lidice and some awareness of what it might be like to have his stomach torn open by ten-penny nails while munching on garlic bread in a pizza parlor in Jerusalem. The civilian casualties at Oradour and Lidice were not collateral damage and neither were the dead Israelis in the Jerusalem pizza parlor nor were the victims of other suicide bomber attacks on busses and bar mitzvahs. The killings were intentional and meant to terrorize.

The Israelis have not responded by attacking civilians but have went after the terrorists and if Falk were academically pure at heart, he would never have made his ridiculous comparison. Being forced to show identification at a checkpoint is not a gross abridgement of international law and morality except in the minds of Ward Churchill, Ibrahim Hooper and the Saudi-sponsored professors in the Middle East Studies Department at Colombia University. (There are others)

What Israel is doing in Gaza, says Falk, is a form of collective punishment. Sure, and so are the taxes Americans pay that help finance the UN, the PLO, Princeton University and Falk’s livelihood. Not much bang for the buck, but to equate security measures and self-preservation with Nazi terrorism, as Falk is doing, is worse than Orwellian—it is Goebbelesque.

The PLO in its various mutations has murdered more Palestinians than the Israelis, has stolen more money intended for the Palestinians than Capone took out of Chicago and spreads more hatred in a single day than Stormfront, the Klan and the Aryan Nation can do in a thousand.

Would it be asking too much of Richard Falk to get out in the world and take a look around, stare truth in the face, commune with Norm Peterson and Cliff Claven instead of Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky? Falk spends more time wailing and gnashing his teeth over what happened to 100,000 Japanese-Americans interned during World War II than commiserating with the survivors of those who lost their lives in the World Trade Center on 9/11, a disaster that he now believes, after high level discussions with Kevin Barrett, to have been an inside job. The Pentagon will be more difficult to explain.

“The record leads to the unhappy conclusion,” he said, “that ours is a political culture that doesn’t handle stress very well.”

Really? Rosie the Riveter went back to work on 9/12; John Henry on 9/13. The economy didn’t collapse and there were no mass suicides. How is that for stress management? There are more Pattons and Shermans left in America than Falk would like.

“It (America) has set some dreadful precedents in past dealing with groups and ideas that were viewed as hostile to the beliefs and interests of the American mainstream,” says Falk.

Was he talking about fascism and communism? Of course not, he was talking about J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and George W. Bush. Many of those swimming in Falk’s mainstream haven’t recovered from the fall of the Soviet Union.

“What I think we have to realize, with alarm,” says Falk, “is that a group of evangelical geo-politicians have seized control of the government, sensing their historical opportunity to shape the future of the world and that this reactionary cabal is supported and reinforced by the religious right in America that is also now, for the first time, exerting a direct influence on our political destiny, challenging the secular heritage of the country.”

Secular heritage? Where did that come from? Barack Obama?

How is this for a secular heritage?

“Every student shall attend worship in the college hall morning and evening at the hours appointed and shall behave with gravity and reverence during the whole service. Every student shall attend public worship on the Sabbath…Besides the public exercises of religious worship on the Sabbath, there shall be assigned to each class certain exercises for their religious instruction suited to the age and standing of the pupils…and no student belonging to any class shall neglect them. (The Laws of the College of New-Jersey (Princeton), requirements during the presidency of John Witherspoon, president directly before the American Revolution)

My! My! Heretics at Princeton! And the 1850s too! Is there anything else Falk could be wrong about?

Why shouldn’t every five-year-old be informed about gay marriages? They are as common as chiggers on a chipmunk and almost as irritating. The kids need to be prepared for what’s in store for them in this life and one of those things is gay marriage. Who in their right mind would want Alfalfa and Darla to grow up like Potsy and Ralph Malph? Certainly not Paul Ash, Superintendent of Schools in Lexington, Massachusetts. The kids have a right to know such things and if they don’t learn about them on The View or from Rosie O’Donnell who’s going to tell them? Pat Robertson? No, but Paul Ash and Estabrook Elementary School will see to it that they are appropriately informed.

They teach diversity at Estabrook according to the Gospel of Adam and Steve as Jerry Falwell would have said. While Potsy and Ralph Malph check The King and I out of the high school library, Junior takes King and King or Who’s in a Family home from the tot library to show mom and dad. “That’s nice, junior. Now wash your hands and face, we’re going to McDonalds.”

Who’s in the Family is about families—all kinds of families, gay families, straight families, single-parent families, mixed-race families, families with aunts and uncles serving as parents, all kinds of families, no Romulus and Remus, no cyborgs, but all kinds of families. King and King is a 29-page story book about a prince who doesn’t like girls—sorry, Darla—who marries another prince and lives happily ever after with his soul mate as King and King without having to worry about a hysterectomy.

King and King is very popular in educational circles in England. It’s part of a package that includes a DVD entitled That’s a Family. Sound familiar? Promoting the gay agenda is mandatory in England. Schools are using King and King and That’s a Family not because of any particular literary brilliance connected with the book or the DVD or because they want to but to remain in compliance with the gay rights laws that were passed last April. The laws were intended to prevent homophobic bullying. It’s too early to tell whether or not they have achieved that end but they have done a good job of bullying teachers into promoting the gay agenda.

It was two years ago that Dave Parker's five-year-old son came home from Estabrook toting a copy of Who’s in a Family. Dave took a look at the book. It was a nice title but it was misleading. It wasn’t about Archie and Edith and Gloria and the Meathead—it was about Robin, her dad Clifford, and her dad’s partner Henry. There was also a cat. It could have been a transgendered cat—the book didn’t say.

Dave was disturbed. This was not the kind of religion he practiced. He blamed it on the same-sex marriage law. There were people who thought the legislation gave them the right to teach that kind of stuff to the youngest children. He took his concerns to the Lexington School Commission and was ignored. Negotiations with ‘higher authorities’ followed. Dave wanted his son to be excused from such classes in the future. He was told no one had the authority to do so. Dave persisted, was arrested for trespassing and spent a night in jail. He filed a lawsuit.

The 1^st Court of Appeals concluded no burden was imposed on the free exercise of a parent’s religion to have his or her children taught ideas in a public school that did not coincide with the religious beliefs of the parent. Paul Ash was ecstatic. “We are not required to inform parents in advance of teaching units that include same gender parents or required to release students when such topics are discussed,” he said. The parent can review the material but has no right to withdraw the child from the class. The same as when Junior is told his grandfather stole Texas from Mexico and the rest of America from Chingachgook.

Parker has not given up and the case is on its way to the Supreme Court. Say, isn’t that where Clarence Thomas works? And Antonin Scalia? Yes, it is.

Parker is lucky he doesn’t live in England where the educational bureaucracy has been even more successful in pushing the gay agenda than it has been in Massachusetts. Oh, there have been complaints in England but how far are they likely to get? Last week in Bristol King and King and That’s a Family came under fire from a group of irate parents. A spokesman for the parents said, “Homosexual relationships are not acceptable, as they are not in…many other religions but the main issue is that they didn’t bother to consult with the parents…Homosexuality is not a priority to parents but educational achievement is…This just makes parents think “what the heck is my child being taught at school?”

That is what Dave Parker wanted to know. What the heck were they teaching Junior?

Well, the authorities would soon put this guy in his place, wouldn’t they? He’d be lucky if they didn’t keep him in Old Bailey for a month. Well, the truth is, they didn’t. They treated him with the greatest of deference. He was not any ordinary protestor. He wasn’t some born-again Christian running off at the mouth. No sir, this fellow had credentials. He was Farooq Siddique of the Bristol Muslim Cultural Center.

The schools under scrutiny were Easton Primary School and the Bannerman Road Community School both located in Bristol. And Farooq had more visible support than Parker—far more. Forty protestors showed up at Easton and fifty at Bannerman; a veritable host. The parents were angry because they had not been consulted about the materials used in the class.

“They don’t do sex education until Year Six,” said Siddique, “and at least there you have got the option of withdrawing the children.” Dave Parker does not.

The Bristol City Council proved more accommodating than Paul Ash and the Lexington School Commission. It was the Council’s legal duty under the educational provisions of the April 2007 gay protection law to report and deal with homophobic harassment. Maybe they had gone a bit too far. The materials used by Easton and Bannerman had been supplied by a 28-month government research project known as No Outsiders. Fourteen elementary schools were involved in the program. In addition to King and King, No Outsiders offers And Tango Makes Three, a tale of a baby penguin with two homosexual fathers, and Spacegirl Pukes, a picture book about two mothers who send their daughters on a space trip. Government researchers insist No Outsiders is on the cutting edge of the educational revolution.

The Bristol City Council compromised. The books have been ‘temporarily withdrawn’ until the topic can be addressed in a more inclusive manner.

Those Brits sure know how to negotiate—from King John to Neville Chamberlain, a retreat here, a strategic withdrawal there but they put up more of a fight for King and King than they would have for the Cross or the Union Jack and the removal was only ‘temporary.’ How would Paul ‘Dirty Harry’ Ash have responded?

Say, what if Dave Parker showed up at the next Lexington School Commission meeting accompanied by Ibrahim Hooper and Ahmed Bedier? Wouldn’t that crunch some vertebrae! The Liberal stuffed shirts on that Commission would never have treated a Muslim like they treated Dave Parker.

What a sad state of affairs.

WHY AH PREFERS JESUS CHRIST TO MAHOMET