By Paulina Guerrero, thinc.
Photo: The meetings of the United Nations Human Rights Council take place in the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room of the Palace of Nations, Geneva.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”, has been invited to speak in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Dutch Parliament. This article explains Francesca Albanese’s lack of impartiality and concerning antisemitic views. It argues that Albanese is a disgrace to human rights and the UN and should not be given a platform in national Parliaments.
Please find below the main arguments against Francesca Albanese’s credibility as UN Special Rapporteur and proof of her lack of impartiality and concerning antisemitic views.
Francesca Albanese
Despite the debatable one-sided and inquisitorial nature of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur for the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”, the mandate still requires impartiality from the candidate to be appointed for the position.
Francesca Albanese was from the very beginning not an impartial candidate and should have never been appointed in the first place due to her lifelong radical and antisemitic views.
Francesca Albanese has been Israel’s most hateful and antisemitic enemy perhaps next to Hamas, so much so that even the governments of France and Germany have condemned her antisemitism. As a Special Rapporteur supposedly charged with the task of reporting on human rights violations according to an already discriminatory mandate against the world’s only Jewish state, a well-known antisemite, who was already an anti-Israel activist and former UNWRA official, may not have been the best person for the role.
She complained in an open letter that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby”, routinely compares Israelis to nazis and compares the Palestinian situation to the holocaust.
“Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”
While the title implies concern for all actors in the area, in fact the mandate of the rapporteur—unchanged since February 1993—is solely to investigate “Israel’s violations of the principles and bases of international law.” Whatever Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority may do, against their own people or Israelis, is excluded.
On her application, Albanese was asked whether she holds “any views or opinions that could prejudice the manner in which the candidate discharges the mandate.” She replied “No.” Yet just the year before, Albanese had acknowledged the opposite, saying her “deeply held personal views” on the Palestinian issue “could compromise my objectivity.” Indeed, prior to her 2022 appointment, Albanese had said Israel is “keeping captive millions of civilians,” organized a panel on “Israel Apartheid,” and campaigned for an arms embargo against Israel.
On her application, Albanese also certified no personal conflicts of interest, failing to disclose that her husband, who compares Palestinians to Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto resisting the Nazis, formerly worked for the Palestinian Authority, where he authored a report on Israel’s “exploitative” policies.
Islamic terrorism, Hamas and antisemitism
Since her appointment in 2022, she has used her position to spread antisemitic hatred and to be Hamas’s top supporter at the UN.
In November 2022, Albanese told a Hamas conference: “You have a right to resist.” She also justified the 7th October attacks and since then has minimized Hamas’s ongoing atrocities
She became the first UN human rights rapporteur in history to be condemned for antisemitism by the United States, France, and Germany.
In July 2024, after Ms. Albanese endorsed comparing the Prime Minister of Israel to Adolf Hitler, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations for the first time ever declared a UN official—Francesca Albanese—to be unfit for office.
Rather than promoting human rights and a fair evaluation, she has only used her platform to spread dehumanizing antisemitic rhetoric against the state of Israel and to openly support islamic terrorism.
Albanese posted a public message to the BBC, telling the global media agency that “the Israeli lobby” is “clearly inside your veins” and spoke of an Orwellian nightmare caused “once again by Israel’s greed.” (July 25, 2014)
Albanese systematically denies acts of antisemitism. She told a Harvard University gathering that when Hamas refer to killing Jews (“Yahudis”), they do not actually mean Jews.
She has referred to Gaza as a concentration camp and masks her antisemitism with “anti-Israel/anti-Zionism” by flipping the narrative to turn the situation in Palestine as the new holocaust while at the same time falling into ancient old antisemitic tropes of Jews controlling the world and Jews being responsible for their own suffering
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis is a textbook case of antisemitism under the IHRA definition.
Albanese implied that the Palestinians had no other choice but to invade and attack Israel in response to its “illegal” occupation and other violations —Albanese’s immediate reaction on October 7, 2023 was to justify the horrific Hamas attack, stating, “Today’s violence must be put in context.” Instinctively, on the day of the worst massacre and sadistic torture of Jews since the Holocaust, Albanese blamed Israel for “aggression.” But Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and the Hamas Charter clearly states the genocidal intent to wipe out the state of Israel and then kill all the Jews worldwide.
Astonishingly, Albanese actually participated in an official Hamas conference. The gathering was organized by Hamas’s Council on International Relations, to address “the impact of the Israeli blockade.” Speaking by video, Albanese told the assembled terrorists, “You have a right to resist this occupation.” She added: “Israel says ‘resistance equals terrorism,’ but an occupation requires violence and generates violence.” Albanese participated in the Hamas conference together with Ghazi Hamad, former Hamas Deputy Foreign Minister; Abd al-Latif al-Qanu, Hamas spokesperson; Ahmad al-Mudallal, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader; Khadr Habib, PIJ leader in Gaza; as well as Basem Naim and Isam al-Da’alis from Hamas. (November 2022).
UNHRC
What is most grave, is that someone designated by the UNHRC for the position to investigate and report on human rights violations committed in a given territory should not engage in hateful rhetoric against a country, especially not the country their mandate is to investigate, let alone push for its elimination, and be part of lobby events outside of their official functions.
Before Israel started its ground invasion, Albanese led an official UN statement by seven experts outrageously warning of “genocide” in Gaza. (October 19, 2023). Albanese had already accused Israel of genocide prior to October 7 when she endorsed a claim that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. (March 1, 2023). Indeed, she has been falsely accusing Israel of “genocide” since at least July 2014.
Distorting history
Francesca Albanese equates the Palestinian “nakba” to the holocaust, casually not mentioning that 5 Arab nations immediately attacked Israel only a day after it declared its independence in an attempt to “drive all the jews to the sea”.
Not only does Albanese base her antisemitism and support for terrorism on a distorted narrative that equates the situation in Palestine (and the “nakba”) with the holocaust but on the denial of Israel’s right to self-defence and any right to exist at all.
Albanese calls to end “Israel’s Apartheid regime,” meaning to end the Jewish State of Israel which she declares to be an apartheid state. (July 19, 2024).
Delegitimizing Israel
She tweets about Israel’s “violent 55 year-old occupation,” and then endorses her follower’s correction (later deleted) that it is “74 years, not 55.” The sender responds to the correction, tweeting “that is another story. Even more painful. Still longing for justice,” meaning longing for justice regarding the very creation of Israel in 1948. Then Albanese likes a reply claiming that Israel’s occupation goes back more than 100 years to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. (August 8, 2022)
In an interview for the Palestine Chronicle, Albanese attacked Israel’s very existence, saying the Jewish state is “in long-standing breach of the basic principles of international law, which started 70 years ago with the forced depopulation of two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population in what became the State of Israel in British Mandate Palestine.” (October 28, 2021).
She refers to Israeli territory as the Palestinian “homeland.” (May 14, 2021). All of this going with the “Palestinian identity” as Arab created until the late 1960s completely erasing Jewish 3.000 year old history and disregarding Jewish origins in the land of Judea and Israel.
Summary
For all this reasons she is a dangerous person to have at the UN and to be given even more of a platform by inviting her to the parliament.
Francesca Albanese is a disgrace to human rights and the UN, and worst of all, a rabid enemy of Israel and the Jewish people.
References
The curious case of Francesca Albanese – Israel and International Law