Floundering among one’s Piers: Albanese struggles on basic questions

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, continues to court much controversy – in a way that is perhaps emblematic of what so many see as the precarious ongoing position the UN occupies with regard to Israel.

As a Special Rapporteur, Ms. Albanese discharges her mandate under a Code of Conduct applicable to all UN Human Rights Council special mandate-holders, with duties including independence and impartiality, and a requirement to solemnly declare that functions will be performed “from a completely impartial… standpoint“.

Against those requirements, there has been a mounting body of evidence suggesting quite the contrary from Ms. Albanese, particularly following the events of October 7th, 2023. Even before that time, and as astutely pointed out by the NGO ‘UN Watch’, Ms. Albanese had stated “No” (on her application form for the role of Special Rapporteur in 2022) to a question which asked if she held “any views or opinions that could prejudice the manner in which the candidate discharges the mandate“. This was despite Ms. Albanese having admitted the year prior in a webinar on YouTube that her “deeply held personal views” on the issue of Palestine “could compromise my objectivity“.

But for those unfamiliar with Ms. Albanese at that time, her appearance last week on Talk TV’s Piers Morgan Uncensored should give you all you need to know.

The episode as a whole has so far amassed over 1.1 million views, and for those watching along, it won’t have taken long for the interview’s direction to become apparent. The purposes of the interview were: to obtain Ms. Albanese’s reaction to the arrest warrants just issued against Israeli leaders by the ICC; to discuss her views on October 7th in the context of certain questionable tweets of hers from that time; and, eventually, to obtain her view on Israel’s response over the past year.

Notwithstanding certain eyebrow-raising remarks Ms. Albanese made in answer to the first topic, it was the second which was where the interview became stuck, with Ms. Albanese striving constantly to move matters on to the third.

Piers began this segment by referencing Ms. Albanese’s tweet, on October 7th 2023, that “today’s violence must be put in [the] context [of] almost six decades of hostile military rule over an entire civilian population…“. Having retorted that she was against crimes against civilians whatever their nationality, she was asked if she thought this was a terrorist attack.

Her reply was that we could call it terrorism, “but [that] doesn’t justify what Israel has done as of October 9th“. Arguable though that might be, the tweet she was asked about was two days before October 9th, where, of course, she had no knowledge of what Israel would do next.

Pressed on what exactly Israel was supposed to do on that date, Ms. Albanese said that Israel had all the rights to repel the attack, including by using lethal force, but on its own territory. Piers responded that surely Israel had the right to go after Hamas in Gazan territory, to which Ms. Albanese huffed “I would be very careful” – the legal definition of self-defense went no further than what she had outlined above, but, moreover, the hostages could only lawfully be released by “negotiating”.

Immediately asked why Israel should negotiate with Hamas, back came an attitude-laden “Excuse me!” from Ms. Albanese. Israel, she explained, had been both negotiating and killing, maiming and starving civilians in order to try and rescue hostages. An increasingly irked Morgan said “we’re going to come to that… it’s over a year later“, and again took her back to what, at the time, she thought Israel had the right to do.

A frustrated Ms. Albanese replied: “Piers, let’s move forward, because we are stuck”. It is frankly a marvel she couldn’t work out why. Predictably, she again attempted to bring forward the next part of the interview, straw-manning the question of what Israel had the right to do on October 9th through the prism of what Israel had done in the months following October 9th, and that it had no right to do that.

Piers Morgan, now frustrated, felt that he should at least acknowledge the force of all the individual points Ms. Albanese was making, even agreeing in places. But he rightly reminded her that this was a different argument to that over what Israel’s rights were on October 9th.

Quite incredibly, her next attempt at a response was that Israel had to end its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. She turned the question back and asked:

What [can the Palestinians do]? Because they have tried armed resistance, they have renounced armed resistance, they have gone to the International Court of Justice, to the ICC, they have tried diplomacy…

This was bad enough as an answer to the question, let alone that it completely ignored the Palestinians’ famous commitment at Oslo to resolve things only by political, not legal (and certainly not violent) means… or that it attempted to tether this to Israel’s rights to repel attacks of the highest savagery and barbarism, led by groups hell-bent on the re-claiming of the entire land of Israel through violent struggle, and the murder of Jews everywhere around the world.

However much Israel’s actions in Gaza can be questioned and debated to high heaven, neither that nor the occupation of the West Bank is needed in order to answer the question of what rights Israel had to repel the worst terrorist attack in its history as of October 9th. These weren’t difficult questions to answer.

Piers Morgan, having accepted he would not get an answer, moved on. The next tweet under examination was from October 11th, 2023, in which Ms. Albanese had appeared to downplay reports of the widespread rape of Israeli women. Did she now accept that this happened, albeit with the benefit of hindsight, following a UN report last March?

With barely a shred of empathy in her response, Ms. Albanese said she preferred to rely on two further UN fact-finding reports which casted doubt on this. It was not her job to investigate the claims herself, so if rape did occur, it should have been investigated, prosecuted and punished.

Putting to one side that Ms. Albanese’s job is clearly not to investigate and gather evidence on such crimes, and that this still did not stop her reaching for highly disputed statistics from Hamas agencies on civilian deaths earlier in the interview, her next utterances should have stretched viewers’ incredulity beyond measure. She said: “So let’s assume rape occurred? So? Does it justify what Israel have done?“. And asked why she didn’t believe the reports, Ms. Albanese, now at her angriest, shouted: “because of the beheaded babies!“.

So, for Ms. Albanese, widely-debunked reports of beheaded babies on October 7th somehow meant that well-documented reports of entirely separate horrors from that day were automatically incapable of being believed, whether at the time or now. Even the mere killing of babies by other methods, and the broadcasting of Hamas’s actions on GoPro cameras, as Piers next mentioned, wasn’t enough. Ms. Albanese, now smiling in anger, gave a labored, tired condemnation of “any crimes that were committed on October 7th“, only to then ask: “but what purpose does it serve?“. A question so bad, for someone ostensibly operating under impartiality, that it should never be capable of being dignified with an answer.

Not even a half-hearted apology for saying “the Jewish lobby” in a tweet 10 years ago could put a shine on this. In one short, 30 minute interview, a UN Special Rapporteur bound under duties of impartiality and independence gave us straw man logic, whataboutery, hindsight bias on steroids, and a failure to properly answer nearly every basic question put to her.

More than that: we were given the impression that every condemnation of October 7th prompted of her was some burdensome chore. That she possessed a clear hesitancy, both verbally and in body language, to concede on even basic points. Equivocation at almost every turn. Adrenaline-induced defensiveness. And frequently desperate attempts to move the interview onto more comfortable territory.

For those who saw it as I did, this wasn’t a principled, intellectual defence of innocent Palestinian civilians over the past year by a UN Special Rapporteur. This was much more a defense of Francesca Albanese. And a full-frontal assault on the embattled State of Israel.