Richard A. Falk

I had to stand up to Israel Apartheid Week.

We had, you may know, at UCSB, the former UN reporter by the name of Richard Falk.

His job was to really to demonize Israel and report on... well, what I would call fabrication about Israel's conduct in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

And he was a professor at UCSB.

It's not sufficient, okay? We want way more.

Ban Ki-moon condemned Richard Falk when Albanese's predecessor supported the 9-11 conspiracy theory and justified somehow made some weird comments about the Boston Marathon bombing, which were done by jihadist terrorists.

And he, I think, alleged that the U.S. or Israel were profiting by it or connected.

Ban Ki-moon condemned him.

But if we do want to see a silver lining here, the silver lining is not just that something is better than nothing.

It's also that, and this goes back in my mind to our discussion with Richard Falk, one of our first guests in this podcast almost three years ago now.

And one of the points that he makes, not just in our discussion, but he's made this more broadly too, is that the struggle right now is over legitimacy.

The question of the legitimacy of the Israeli state project, that's part of what's at stake right now.

So for example, in another world that explores justice and, you know, what if, you know, international humanitarian law was something that was actually upheld universally here in our reality instead of being a tool that's utilized selectively by the powerful states.

I mean, we asked the most distinguished international law- lawyer that we could find, Richard Falk, you know, who's spent-- He's now in his 90s, you know, and he's still working.

He's still committed to, you know, [chuckles] an application of this, of this law that is universal.

Um, you know, he's, he's been around for so long and so consistently active, you know, drafting the 1973 Ecocide Convention for the UN, which was the very first ecocide convention, um, and now, you know, committed to sort of trying to alleviate suffering in so many parts of the world.