Richard Falk, the discredited and disgraced fringe antisemitic conspiracy theorist and the former UN envoy, has been prevented from holding an event at Middlesex University tomorrow. The university had insisted the event would take place, but following intervention by Campaign Against Antisemitism, the university has now decided to cancel the event.
This development comes hours after the University of East London took action to stop another event at which Falk was due to speak.
Falk had intended to speak about his new book, “Palestine’s Horizon”. Yesterday he held a similar event at the London School of Economics at which antisemites in the audience told Jewish students that “the Jews were expelled from Germany for misbehaving” and that they should read the works of disgraced historian David Irving, who in 2000 was proven in court to be an antisemite, a Holocaust denier and an admirer of Hitler. It is also reported that Atzmon later said, “Jews are always expelled for a reason.”
Falk, the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights for the Palestinian Territories from 2008-2014, has been condemned repeatedly for making antisemitic remarks. He has been denounced by the United Kingdom on at least three separate occasions for antisemitism, as detailed by UN Watch in an open letter.
For example, in 2012 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office condemned Falk for providing the cover endorsement of a virulently antisemitic book that describes Jews as Nazis and which asks whether “Hitler might have been right after all”. In 2011, then Prime Minister David Cameron “strongly condemned” Falk’s publication of an antisemitic cartoon. The image posted by Falk on his blog showed a dog wearing a Jewish skullcap, urinating on a depiction of justice, and devouring a bloody skeleton.
Falk was publicly rebuked by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2011 for suggesting the 9/11 terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the US government. He blamed the Boston bombings on “American global domination” and “Tel Aviv”. In fact, Falk’s glorification of the Hamas terrorist group, which calls for the genocide of all Jews worldwide in its Charter, was so severe that even the Palestinian Authority sought to expel him from the UN.
We are very pleased to have been able to prevent this notorious antisemite from speaking at the University of East London and Middlesex University, but he should never have even been considered as an appropriate speaker.
We are lodging a formal complaint with LSE and the Higher Education Funding Council for England over the disgraceful event held there yesterday.
If you are aware of an antisemitic speaker being invited to speak at a university, please contact [email protected].
