Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
— “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Paul Revere would understand Richard Falk instantly.
Falk, the Princeton professor — and American — who serves as a United Nations Human Rights Council rapporteur is a prime example of what in Revere’s day were called Tories.
Falk, a professional leftist activist, is also a 9/11 “Truther” — which we will come back to in a moment.
If you missed it, Professor Falk is in the news for saying that — you’ll love this — Boston got what it deserved.
That’s right.
Eight-year-old Martin Richards, 29-year old Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, a 23-year-old Boston University student from China, and Sean Collier, the MIT policeman shot in the head while he sat in his patrol car — they all had it coming to them, according to the Professor. Not to mention all the rest who were seriously wounded. They had it coming too.
Specifically, Falk says that America is “Islamophobic” (without explaining why a country that hates Islam would come to the aid over the years of Muslims in Bosnia, Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) and that Massachusetts and Boston authorities were guilty of a “hysterical dragnet” in trying to track down the Tsarnaev brothers. There’s more.
But before we get to that more, let’s recall the original American Tories that Paul Revere had to deal with in 1775. Revere, of course, was the Boston silversmith who became a legend by riding through the April 18th night of 1775 (as immortalized in that famous Longfellow poem, the first stanza quoted above) to warn his fellow citizens that the British army was on the march to confiscate rebel arms in Lexington and Concord.
Revere was a “Patriot” in the language of the day. Which meant he was supporting American independence from the British crown. Hence the formal title of the Massachusetts holiday that was being celebrated on that fateful Monday of the Boston Marathon — Patriots’ Day. Patriots’ Day, an annual holiday to mark the Battles of Lexington and Concord that took place on April 19.
Well aside from General Thomas Gage’s British troops that swarmed Boston in 1775, there was another group that Revere and his fellow Patriots had to deal with in their struggle for freedom.
That would be their fellow American citizens. Those who were adamantly opposed to independence and were in fact loyal to the British King. They were called “loyalists” in the day — and shorthanded as “Tories.”
As the furious tide of Patriot anger rose at the British, their attention turned to their fellow citizens — the Tories. The latter suspected, “with good reason” writes Revere biographer Esther Forbes, of being “enemies and traitors to their own country.” Life was made so difficult for Patriots by the British and their Tory supporters that the Patriots began streaming out of Boston, and ironically, in light of today’s headlines, the Revere family temporarily relocated with other Patriot families to — yes — Watertown. The very place that today marks the site of the riveting final battle of American authorities with the brothers Tsarnaev.
So deep was the divide between Boston Patriots and Tories that when the British were finally forced to evacuate Boston — thanks to those captured cannon by the Patriots’ one-time bookstore owner-turned-militia man Henry Knox — the British General Gage took 1,100 Tories with him, many making their way to exile in Nova Scotia or England itself.
But before they left, while the struggle for Boston was ongoing, Tories were suspected of outright sabotage of the Patriot fight, Forbes writing that they would “send intelligence, burn (Patriot) military stores and spike cannon.
Stop here.
While this was the first time in the history of what would become the United States that there was a considerable divide between those who believed in America and a distinct minority whose loyalties lay elsewhere, it would not be the last.
Most obviously the issue arose in dramatic form with the advent of the Civil War. But in fact that was a “civil war” in every sense of the word, with dueling governments and armies doing repeated and vivid battle across the American countryside between 1861 and 1865.
Yet well beyond that moment in time — notably in the last century right up until today — the “loyalist” issue has appeared again and again and again.
What, after all, were all those American Communists that surfaced in one place or another from the dawn of the Russian Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Who, for example, was Alger Hiss? The infamous Roosevelt State Department aide turned Soviet spy.
Alger Hiss was a pluperfect example of what might be called the New American Tory. Someone whose loyalty was not to the country that gave him everything, including the finest education (Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law) and access to prestigious jobs working for the very top officials of the American government and later a prominent think tank. No, Hiss’s loyalty was to Communism — a way of life that was not only antithetical to everything American but that in his day was actively on the move to subject the world to a totalitarian dictatorship. A dictatorship that already murdered millions in its quest for power.
Who, for example, was Bill Ayers? The infamous Weatherman bomber of the 1960s?
Bill Ayers was the son of a prominent Chicago businessman (father Thomas was the Chairman of Commonwealth Edison) and grew up in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn. Like Hiss, Ayers was educated at the best of American schools (the University of Michigan). With this background, Ayers decided the best way to influence American politics was not to run for office but to run around the country setting off bombs, supporting a move for the armed robberies of banks. Which is to say that in the style of the New American Tories his loyalty was to the radical left — a way of life that was yet again antithetical to freedom and liberty, specifically supporting violence, murder, and mayhem.
Neither Hiss nor Ayers were alone, of course. And the only thing that has changed in the years since is that the latest version of the New American Tory — Toryism 2.0 if you will — is stitching American Leftism to Islam.
Which brings us to Professor Richard Falk.
Saying that Boston deserved what it got is the kind of thinking that is in fact standard for Falk, this latest example of the New American Tory. In the past, aside from proclaiming that America was bent on “global domination” (?!!) he has been on record as saying:
• On March 26, 2008:
It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don’t think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess.
• In the David Ray Griffin book The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 Falk has written the foreword for a book that, in the words of its publisher:
Taking to heart the idea that those who benefit from a crime ought to be investigated, here the eminent theologian David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 — stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves — and finds that, taken together, they cast serious doubt on the official story of that tragic day.
There have been questions raised here and there and allegations of official complicity made almost from the day of the attacks, especially in Europe, but no one until Griffin has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account.”
This is exactly why we voted against the new human rights council.
Be that as it were, Falk is where he is, ensconced at Princeton and the UN, running around the world professing his New American Tory sentiments and carrying the official imprimatur of the United Nations while he does it. A United Nations that received (as noted in 2010) over $6 billion in American taxpayer money.
This newest version of the New American Tory that is exemplified by Professor Falk has in fact been explored by Andrew C. McCarthy in his book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. McCarthy makes a point of studying the links between the American Left and Islam.
Remembering that McCarthy’s publisher said in 2010 — three years ago at the time that the book was published:
With the help of witting and unwitting accomplices in and out of government, Islamism doesn’t merely fuel terrorism but spawns America-hating Islamic enclaves in our very midst…
Does the name Boston in 2013 ring a bell?
What we have here with Professor Falk is but the latest example of an American who really isn’t.
Someone who claims American citizenship but in fact has a higher loyalty — to the British crown in the Boston of 1775, to the Soviet Union in the Washington of 1948, to radical leftism in the America of 1969.
Now the New American Tory is loyal to that grand combination of radical Islam and the American Left.
To put human faces on all of this, this latest New American Tory, Professor Falk, looks at Tamerlan Tsarnaev and brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaeva and sees victims. Both of whom, by the way, having now been revealed as being on welfare supplied by the taxpayers of Massachusetts.
The New Tories of 2013 look at the families of the dead and wounded of Boston and think:
They deserved it.
Paul Revere would understand instantly how this game works.
It is exactly why he climbed on his horse:
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.
