Morningside Heights — and Lows

In most places, Richard Falk would be dismissed as a kook. Not at Columbia. The university’s Heyman Center for Humanities just announced that Falk will deliver a lecture named for the late Edward Said.

Said, of course, was a Columbia professor of English known more for his advocacy than his scholarship. An apologist for the Palestine Liberation Organization, he regularly denounced scholars who disagreed with his sweeping generalizations about the Arab world as blinded by European colonialism.

In this sense, Richard Falk has earned the right to have his name associated with Said’s. Falk, for example, has sided with the conspiracy theorists over 9/11. While still a UN special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights for the United Nations, he described the Boston Marathon bombing as an act of “resistance” to “the American globaldomination project.”

So extreme are his views, he’s been denounced by UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Kimoon, British Prime Minister David Cameron and thenUN Ambassador Susan Rice. Last December, after Falk accused Israel on Russian TV of having “genocidal” intentions toward the Palestinian people, even the Obama State Department — no fans of Israel — denounced Falk “in the strongest possible terms,” adding that his work has “been onesided and biased.”

Anywhere but academe, honest and intelligent people would not be providing a platform for such a man. Then again, should we really be surprised that a university that rolled out the welcome mat for Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would find Richard Falk a fitting guest lecturer?