McCain reiterated in his foreign policy speech this week the need for a new international organization comprised of the world's democracies--a League of Democracies as McCain calls it. Despite McCain's repeated insistence that this new organization " would not supplant the United Nations," Charles Krauthammer gave hope to conservatives everywhere when he said McCain's "got a hidden agenda...to essentially kill the U.N." Now Mike Boyer gives us another reason to hope that's true. Boyer reports that the U.N. "Human Rights Council has appointed Princeton University Professor Richard Falk to a six-year term as the special investigator into Israel's actions in the Palestinian Territories." And what's the problem with this? Boyer quotes from an article Falk wrote last June:
Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.
Is Professor Falk a smug left-winger with a penchant for pretentious prose and moral equivalency? I think so. Anyway, no real surprise that the new Human Rights Council is as morally bankrupt as the old Human Rights Commission. I only wish I was as certain as Krauthammer that McCain really does have a hidden agenda to rid us of this kind of hypocrisy once and for all. And just as an aside, this is the second second-rate Princeton professor I've come across in just the last two days. The first was Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African American studies, who I caught yesterday on a rerun of Bill Maher's show. Describing Harris-Lacewell's performance on the show as mediocre would be irresponsible overstatement, and she also said she "spent seven years attending Reverend Wright's church when I lived in Chicago." Maybe the Rev. should open a new ministry at Princeton, it sounds like he'd find a receptive audience for his anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism among the faculty there. Update: To their credit, Princeton students remain committed to this country's alliance with Israel, even if their professors do not.