(I gave two examples of how others see themselves as both Jewish and something else at the same time — Jews who are ALSO Buddhists, and Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Neither of these examples referred specifically to Richard Falk.)

What I did write is that he IS Jewish — though he MAY ALSO be Baha’i.

In the statement attributed to him in Wikipedia, he says he is “Jewish with a virtual denial of … Jewishness”. That remark is sourced to a book to which I do not have access.

In the same Wikipedia profile, he is also said to have described himself as “an American Jew”.

So, when you click on the reference, you find that what Falk did write, in a controversial article, is that “it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust’ … Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever the ethos of ‘a responsibility to protect,’ recently adopted by the UN Security Council as the basis of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from further pain and suffering. But it would be unrealistic to expect the UN to do anything in the face of this crisis, given the pattern of US support for Israel and taking into account the extent to which European governments have lent their weight to recent illicit efforts to crush Hamas as a Palestinian political force”.

The full article can be found here: http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/Falk_PalestineGenocide.html

Falk’s thoughts were published at the end of June 2007 — just after Hamas had kicked Fatah Preventive Security forces out of power in Gaza.

(Please see this article in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, published in early March 2008, for some perspective on this development: The Gaza Bombshell, written by David Rose, which claims that there was “a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war”, and that this plan, “was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power”. The article also reports that “Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup. Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of ‘engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory’. He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. ‘It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen’, Wurmser says” … A State Department official adds, ‘Those in charge of implementing the policy were saying, ‘Do whatever it takes. We have to be in a position for Fatah to defeat Hamas militarily, and only Muhammad Dahlan has the guile and the muscle to do this.’ The expectation was that this was where it would end up—with a military showdown’. There were, this official says, two ‘parallel programs’—the overt one, which the administration took to Congress, ‘and a covert one, not only to buy arms but to pay the salaries of security personnel’.” etc… You can find this article here: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804.)

Falk later acknowledged somewhere that the thoughts he expressed in his June 2007 article had disturbed or offended some people and MIGHT have been better expressed, but that his intention was sincere …

It is interesting that Falk also wrote, just days before the start of the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza [please note that the IDF and the Israeli MFA have both said that they believed almost all young adult males in Gaza were Hamas militants, as I have documented elsewhere in this blog], in an article published in the Comment is Free section of The Guardian newspaper about his hours of inspection, interrogation, and overnight detention upon arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, follwed by his deportation, that: “Israel had all along accused me of bias and of making inflammatory charges relating to the occupation of Palestinian territories. I deny that I am biased, but rather insist that I have tried to be truthful in assessing the facts and relevant law. It is the character of the occupation that gives rise to sharp criticism of Israel’s approach, especially its harsh blockade of Gaza, resulting in the collective punishment of the 1.5 million inhabitants. By attacking the observer rather than what is observed, Israel plays a clever mind game. It directs attention away from the realities of the occupation, practising effectively a politics of distraction. The blockade of Gaza serves no legitimate Israeli function. It is supposedly imposed in retaliation for some Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that have been fired across the border at the Israeli town of Sderot. The wrongfulness of firing such rockets is unquestionable, yet this in no way justifies indiscriminate Israeli retaliation against the entire civilian population of Gaza. The purpose of my reports is to document on behalf of the UN the urgency of the situation in Gaza and elsewhere in occupied Palestine. Such work is particularly important now as there are signs of a renewed escalation of violence and even of a threatened Israeli reoccupation. Before such a catastrophe happens, it is important to make the situation as transparent as possible, and that is what I had hoped to do in carrying out my mission. Although denied entry, my effort will continue to use all available means to document the realities of the Israeli occupation as truthfully as possible“.

Then, the war started. It was an unprecedented action against a captive people, who had nowhere to flee, and who are both under occupation and an Israeli military-administered blockade. This war lasted three terrible weeks.

Falk is just a human being, and therefore not perfect, but he has consistently stood for justice for the Palestinians.

It seems to me that Falk’s own position on his own identity appears to be inclusionist, rather than exclusionist. And he does not deny that he is Jewish.

“Don’t you think it is possible to be Jewish and Buddhist? I know of one family that is Jewish and Catholic … [HINT: They converted, the son first, and they are all devout Catholics who are also very proud to be Jewish]”

my question is: Has Richard Falk converted to the Bahia religion.

now given this sourced from wiki: “Falk described his family background as “assimilationist Jewish with a virtual denial of even the ethnic side of Jewishness.” is true and given your statement about him being bahia, then it could be argued that Richard Falk has removed himself from both his jewish religion and jewish ethnicity. If that is true then just what element(s) of jewishness is/are left?

What is it about Bahais? Whenever someone’s in the news (ge Abu Mazen in 2003) someone cries says “He’s a Bahai!”

Not possible to be both jewish and bahai.