Richard Falk, who carries a UN Mandate to write reports based solely on testimony from people who loathe Israel, has given an interview to the “Democracy Now!” show in the aftermath of his expulsion from Israel.

Host Amy Goodman intoned the words, “Richard Falk is now back at home in California,” before embarking on an interview that Falk doubtless found equally soothing. “Let me come to these issues that you appropriately raised,” he said.

Issues like comparing Israel with the Nazis.

“I never compared the reality of what is going on in Gaza to the Holocaust,” Falk protested. “What I did say was that the kinds of collective punishment that are being imposed on the entire people of Gaza have a resemblance to collective punishment that was imposed by the Nazis in Germany and that if this kind of circumstance is allowed to persist, it could produce a holocaust. I never suggested that what was happening was a holocaust.”

Got that? Israel hasn’t - yet - embarked on a campaign of mass extermination, but in its application of what Falk describes as “collective punishment,” it has taken a page out of the Nazis own book.

Prior to embarking on the actual elimination of Jewish populations under their control, the Nazis set several milestones in place. They enacted the Nuremburg Laws, which applied the principles of racial pseudoscience to law, elevating “Aryans” above Jews. They launched pogroms like Kristallnacht, to intimidate German Jews and give them a foretaste of what was to come. They herded Jewish populations into ghettoes - places which were, frankly, far more hellish than Gaza is now - in order to better facilitate their eventual transportation to extermination camps; as I said in an earlier post, “the ghettos were a result of the Nazi decision to embark upon extermination.”

Israel is not about to enact a “holocaust” in Gaza, nor is it taking any of the kinds of measures which would suggest that as a goal. But Falk is adamant that Israel is now where Nazi Germany was between, roughly speaking, 1935 and 1941.

It is a comparison that it laughable and offensive and deeply stupid all at the same time. Yet, in a strange way, Falk’s insistence on this point starts to make sense when Amy Goodman moves him onto another issue.

“Yeah. Well, that’s part of this whole effort to shift the focus to me and away from the reality and, at the same time, to somehow paint me as some kind of conspiracy person or theorist, which is absolutely untrue,” Falk said. “What is true is that I wrote the forward to the original book of David Griffin, a longtime friend of mine, which is the most prominent challenge to the validity of the official version of 9/11, and I continue to hold the view that the 9/11 Commission did not adequately address the difficult questions about what happened on 9/11 that he raised. But I haven’t ever and do not now endorse any kind of conspiracy theory. All I think that is true is that the American people and the world deserve a fuller and more credible investigation of those events. ”

David Griffin, the man Falk refers to as his long-time friend, is a die-hard 9/11 conspiracy theorist who draws heavily on the “research” of French writer Thierry Meyssan. Among Meyssan’s claims is that, on September 11, 2001, the Pentagon was hit not by a plane, but by a missile - thus begging the question, what happened to American Airlines Flight 77? When he was interviewed by Amy Goodman, Griffin adapted this slightly (”The very fact that whatever hit the Pentagon was not shot down suggests very strongly that whatever it was, it was not a commercial aircraft, and it was some sort of military aircraft,”) yet still begged the same question: what happened to American Airlines Flight 77?

Griffin is a crank with the political sophistication of an enraged adolescent. In the same interview with Goodman, he solemnly repeated the 9/11 truthers mantra: “The Project for the New American Century, which was formed by people such as Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Perle put together a report called, ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses,’ in which they said that the revolution in military affairs that is necessary would be probably very slow unless there was a new Pearl Harbor.” Later on, Goodman even lost patience with Griffin once he started asserting - and he’s a theologian, by the way, not an engineer - that “many engineers” believe that the twin towers could not have collapsed from the impact of the planes. “Name just one. Name just one structural engineering expert who said it is not feasible that the planes caused the towers to go down,” Goodman demanded. “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information at my fingertips right at this moment,” Griffin replied.

Such is the caliber of the man who wrote the book to which Richard Falk provided an introduction. And note well that Falk had an opportunity, through his interview with Goodman, to dissociate himself from Griffin. He didn’t. In fact, he sounded like he was endorsing him.

A conspiracy theorist with a UN mandate to promote hatred of Israel through Nazi analogies. In the abstract, such a person sounds like the product of a fevered neoconservative imagination: surely there couldn’t be anyone that bad? There is, and his name is Richard Falk. What I said before still stands: Israel was right to boot him out.