American law professor Richard Falk is set to step down as the UN's "Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967," Israeli media is reporting.
The position is seen as having been created within the UN's Human Rights Commission as a further mechanism for promoting the Palestinian Arab agenda and delegitimizing Israel in the world body.
Falk, who is Jewish, is a vehement critic of Israel, Zionism and U.S. policy in the Middle East. He is strongly sympathetic to Hamas policies in the Gaza Strip,
has blamed the Boston marathon bombings on America's "unlawful wars" and "atrocities" in the Muslim world, and
questioned whether al-Qaida was actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Most of the candidates mentioned as possible replacements to Falk equally are also known for their lack of sympathy to Israel.
According to the Hebrew language Ma'ariv newspaper, the list of candidates include Phyllis Bennis, who served as Falk's deputy and supports a partial economic boycott of Israel; British barrister Michael Mansfield, who has represented Palestinian militants in London, and denounced the U.S. for summarily executing Osama bin Laden; Christine Chinkin, an academic and member of the Goldstone Commission which accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza. She later attacked Richard Goldstone when he broke with the commission's findings.
Other candidates are: William Schabas, a defender of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Christine Chanet, a French judge and longtime critic of Israel, and Jan Wijenberg, a former Dutch ambassador to Saudi Arabia who has implied Israel engaged in anti-Arab genocide.
According to Hillel Neuer, of
UN Watch, besides these candidates being biased against Israel, the
nature of the job is inherently slanted against the Jewish state.
The assumption, the site states, is that Israel is guilty of human rights violations which need to be reported while the West Bank Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, and the Hamas leadership in Gaza are never investigated for possible human rights violations.
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