Insult to injury

It’s a testament to America and humanity in general that calamities like the Boston Marathon bombings tend to generate more thoughtfulness than stupidity, more kindness than cruelty.

Nevertheless, the terrorist acts in Boston have drawn more than their fair share of unwise and inappropriate commentary. Like pundits who condemned colleagues for unfounded speculation about “white supremacists” — in the same breath that they speculated about radical Islam. Or the ideologues who accused government and law enforcement of inaction and incompetence in thwarting terrorism — and in the same breath scored those same officials for attempting to pass reasonable gun-control measures. In general, people rush to impose their theories and prejudices on events like the marathon bombings, without waiting for the careful police and intelligence work that can uncover the real story.

But few comments were as egregious as those by Richard Falk, the UN Human Rights Commission official tasked with monitoring the situation “in the Palestinian territories.”

Falk suggested Sunday that the bombings charged to two Chechen immigrants were payback for America’s policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.

“The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance,” Falk wrote in the Foreign Policy Journal. “[T]he United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks.” (Surely a comfort to the families of the three killed and 170 wounded in Boston.) Added Falk: “The war drums are beating at this moment in relation to both North Korea and Iran, and as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”

Israel and its supporters have long suspected the former Princeton professor was picked by UNHRC because of this sort of animus toward Israel and the United States. If his one-sided reports on the Middle East did not disqualify him, we doubt his latest comments will.