A United Nations attorney who is leading an “neutral, third party” investigation into Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was exposed as having a long history of antisemitism, spreading outright lies and conspiracy theories, including the canard that the U.S. is controlled by the “Jewish lobby.”
As recently as last week, as reported in Breitbart News, U.N. Special Rapporteur to the Palestinians Francesca Albanese told an audience at a Hamas-organized event: “You have a right to resist Israel,” echoing comments made during a 50-day summer conflict with Gaza in 2014, in which she justified the rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli civilian populations as “resistance.”
But according to The Times of Israel, her antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred go back much further.
In 2015, Albanese posted a photo to her Facebook page comparing IDF soldiers to Nazis.
She hailed an article written by her husband, Massimiliano Calì, who equated Jews resisting the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto to Hamas terrorists.
Hillel Neuer, founder of the monitoring group U.N. Watch, noted that “Holocaust inversion is a recurring theme for” Albanese. She told an Italian news outlet that the Arab exodus from Israel in 1948, after five Arab armies attacked the fledgling Jewish state, was comparable with the extermination of of six million European Jews. Albanese has also endorsed “killing Israelis.”
In 2014, she said: “America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed — the Palestinians — who defend themselves with the only means they have (deranged missiles), instead of making Israel face its international law responsibilities.”
She slammed a BBC report for not criticizing Israel, writing a letter to the British broadcaster –which is, ironically, notoriously anti-Israel, saying: “The Israeli lobby is clearly inside your veins and system and you will be remembered to have been on the big brother’s side of this orwellian [sic] nightmare caused once again by Israel’s greed. Shame on you BBC.”
The Times of Israel reports:
[Albanese]expressed joy over the European Union’s General Court taking Hamas off of its terror blacklist: “Two good news one after another from the radio while I was taking a nap. Normalization in the relations usa cuba and removal of hamas from the list of terror organizations. Was i dreaming???”
In a laconic response to the Times report, Albanese stopped short of apologizing for her comments, though she did imply that she would not make the same remarks today.…
She has rejected any Israeli presence in the West Bank as “foreign alien domination,” saying it has “no justification,” “no reason,” and calling it “an instrument to colonize the land.”
Israel justifies its presence in the West Bank, which sits on highlands overlooking the country’s central plains, on security grounds. There is also heavily documented evidence of a Jewish presence in the West Bank going back thousands of years which is recognized by UNESCO, among other bodies.
In 2018 Albanese posted a screenshot of a quote she attributed to David Ben-Gurion that said, “We will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” The quote appeared to be a translation of a disputed 1937 letter Ben Gurion wrote to his son.
Albanese commented that “taking all of Palestine (and much more in fact) has always been the plan of the Zionists.”
She has also said Israel may be guilty of alleged major crimes including genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
his year that “dozens” of journalists have been killed in the conflict since the year 2000, all by Israel. According to the UN’s own statistics, both those claims are false.
“There is a practice of willful killing that is ongoing and could definitely be a crime against humanity,” she said.
According to the report, Albanese declared she was objective when she applied for the rapporteur position, but later admitted that she had doubts, saying that “deep down I feared that embarking on research on a matter in which I had deeply held personal views could compromise my objectivity.”
Albanese told The Times of Israel some of her past comments were “infelicitous, analytically inaccurate and unintendedly offensive.”
“People make mistakes. I distance myself from these words, which I would not use today, nor have used as a UN Special Rapporteur,” she added.
“Following this clarification, our attention should not be distracted from the unlawful state practices which cause suffering for millions and denial of human rights on a daily basis in the occupied Palestinian territory,” she added. “This is what I am mandated to report on and which should be our focus.”
Meanwhile, one of three members of the UNHRC’s Commission of Inquiry looking into alleged human rights violations on Israel, Miloon Kothari, recently said in a public interview that social media was largely controlled by the “Jewish lobby,” in comments he later retracted.
Forty-nine U..S Congress members last week wrote a letter to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield expressing concern over the commission’s bias.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s office said in response to Kothari’s comments, “There is no room for antisemitism in the work of the U.N.”
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