News & Notes: University Professor emeritus Falk declines debate

Politics professor emeritus Richard Falk rejected a debate challenge from Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz over a book titled “The Wandering Who?”, by Gilad Atzmon, after Falk endorsed the book and Dershowitz described it as “anti-Semitic.”

“[Falk is] out there hawking a book which suggests Jews are trying to control the world, that the Holocaust is a fictional narrative, that Jews may in fact have killed Christian children to use their blood,” Dershowitz said to The Daily Caller of Falk’s endorsement. Dershowitz published an article denouncing Falk’s endorsement and challenging Falk to a debate.

Falk responded with a refusal in an email to TheDC, saying that he had “a limited taste for the sort of defamatory polemics that the Dershowitz attack mounts.”

“I can find nothing useful coming from such a debate, and I would feel demeaned if I adopted his tactics and if I didn’t, I would feel abused for no good end,” Falk said. He added that the quotations Dershowitz used to denounce the book were taken out of context, a claim that Dershowitz said he disagreed with.

Falk, who serves as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, has been called in the past to resign from his post because of his alleged belief that there are gaps in official accounts of the 9/11 attacks.