Francesca Albanese, shame on you

It is highly disturbing, though not surprising, that UN Rapporteur on the Palestinian issue, Francesca Albanese, recently compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.

This extreme offensiveness by an official UN representative should disqualify her from her job. In fact, the seven largest Jewish communities around the world just sent a joint letter to top UN officials calling for her ousting from her position. However, the fact that she remains in her position after making similarly outrageous statements since the October 7 massacre offers little hope that she will be sacked.

A brief look back provides perspective to the latest outrage by Albanese.

Her comment about the Israeli Prime Minister reminds us of earlier outrageous and antisemitic remarks by Albanese. Most notably, in 2014 she accused the “Zionist lobby” of controlling American policy and later compared Israel to the Nazis.

More recently, following a statement by French President Macron defending Israel’s right to self-defense after October 7, Albanese parroted Islamist extremist propaganda. She claimed that the October 7 massacre of Israelis was not antisemitism but a reaction to Israeli oppression. The ignorance and maliciousness of Albanese in her reaction was astounding, even for a UN official. In doing so, she willfully ignored massive amounts of evidence to the contrary.

First, she ignored a basic international concept: there is never any excuse for terrorism, the deliberate murder of innocent civilians. Even if there were any validity to her charge about the reason for the Hamas attack, and there isn’t, there is never any justification or excuse for the deliberate killing of men, women and children, the rape of women, and the taking of over 200 hostages, some of whom are already dead.

For this alone, she should be fired from her job.

But it goes far beyond that. Her comments also ignored Hamas’s long history. The Hamas terrorist organization was founded in 1988, and Albanese must be familiar by now with the Hamas charter, its founding document, which states the purpose of the organization.

The charter clearly does not promote peace and a state for the Palestinians, but instead advocates for the elimination of the Jewish state. It repeats this goal in several places.

Furthermore, directly contradicting Albanese’s outrageous statement, it blames Jews for everything bad that has happened in the world since the French Revolution. It cites the infamous fraudulent antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which falsely claimed to uncover plans by Jewish leaders to take over the world. This document was used by the Nazis to justify the murder of six million Jews.

In other words, Hamas has been rooted in antisemitism from its outset, never seeking peace or recognition of Israel. Its horrendous acts of violence on October 7 were a culmination of its Jew hatred.

At a time when antisemitism is surging around the world in light of the war in the Middle East, Albanese has continuously added fuel to the fire by attributing a legitimacy to the slaughter of Jews.

Not only was Albanese distorting who Hamas is and what its motivations were on October 7, but she did so with the transparent political aim of sustaining Hamas as Israel sought to appropriately eliminate it.

Early on in this war, Hamas leaders have made it clear that their future intention is to commit many massacres just like October 7, together with their consistent goal of destroying Israel. Many forces around the world were sympathetic to that goal. Indeed, so many of the calls for a cease-fire are surrounded by signs reading “From the River to the Sea,” a clear call of support for Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel.

The Special Rapporteur, in her response to Macron, had at least implicitly aligned herself with that crowd by attributing a legitimate political motive, rather than unbridled hate, to Hamas actions. This served the fairly transparent purpose of allowing Hamas to survive Israel’s military operation and to live another day to be able to conduct future terrorist attacks.

As much as Albanese’s statement was intended to delegitimize Israel in the public’s mind, it also had the consequence of further undermining Palestinian aspirations for a better life. As long as Hamas is in power in Gaza, there is no future for the residents of Gaza. A party that deliberates embeds itself in civilian institutions, that seizes humanitarian aid intended for the civilian population and does everything possible to impede efforts by civilians to go to safe places, is not one which shows much concern about its constituents.

Here too, Albanese had not only distorted the truth, but played into the hands of the most destructive elements in the Palestinian camp who are to blame for the continued rejection of Israel which has caused so much Palestinian suffering.

On every level, the Albanese statement is abhorrent and dangerous. To be sure, Albanese is far from the first UN special rapporteur that has shown overt bias against Israel and overt antisemitism, with little response from the UN system. But it is clear that if the UN wants to be a trusted entity, its officials must display impartiality, integrity and accountability. Albanese has shown none of this. She should have resigned immediately.

Now, the largest Jewish communities have come together, calling on the UN to do the appropriate thing. We hope that they will act, as they should have long ago.  Instead she is still around and now comparing Israel’s democratic prime minister to the murderer of 6 million Jews. Shameless.