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Richard Falk's passage to "positive public notoriety"

Bello, Walden
http://www.meer.com/en/67177-richard-falks-passage-to-positive-public-notoriety?fbclid=IwAR2eor5ouDxAWwD-TfjGf3Q9Ssufr7cRsNsnZNhgBQhmvlD6NXRjZuMOOh0

Publisher:  Meer
Date Written:  07/10/2021
Year Published:  2021  
Resource Type:  Article

Richard Falk is universally regarded as one of the top minds when it comes to international law. Yet his views are not only not welcome in establishment circles, but even among most left-leaning liberals. He was once the darling of liberals, someone whose left-of-center views were seen as important in "balancing" conservative and centrist views in debates, seminars, and TV programs. He was, in short, one of the establishment's favorite critics of American foreign policy. That is until he crossed several red lines. The most consequential of these red lines was moving from abstract legal critiques of Israel's policies in the Middle East to one of active sympathy with the Palestinian people's struggle, and especially when he had the temerity to call Israel's fundamental strategy of governance by its name: "apartheid."

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The Zionist lobby went after him with a vengeance, trying to systematically destroy his reputation by painting him as a "self-hating Jew" and as an ideological if not clinical outlier by twisting his stands on events like the Iranian revolution, which they maliciously sought to paint as support for an Islamic theocracy. When that did not work, they went on to wage a silent but effective campaign among both political and ideological powerbrokers to deprive him of opportunities to air his views in the liberal media. The vitriolic whispering campaign against Falk was a lesson in how power can derail challenges to its hegemony by reason in the service of a just cause.

And yet the very act of using political and ideological power to restrict access to the public has shown the attractiveness of Falk's views. Like most efforts at censorship, the Zionist campaign ended up popularizing the ideas it sought to discredit.

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