Francesca Albanese’s ‘Holocaust Inversion’

Among those who now attack Israel for being akin to the Nazis, with Prime Minister Netanyahu painted as the equivalent of Adolf Hitler and the IDF accused of committing “genocide” in Gaza, Francesca Albanese’s name leads all the rest. As the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories, she issues statement after statement denouncing Israel for being akin to Nazi Germany.

More on her Holocaust inversion can be found here: “WJC slams UN’s Albanese for Holocaust inversion, Israel-Nazi comparisons,” by Sam Halpern, Jerusalem Post, October 16, 2024:

The World Jewish Congress slammed UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese on Tuesday for repeatedly engaging in Holocaust inversion by comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.

“The constant statements made by [Albanese] comparing Israel to Nazi Germany are not only deeply offensive, but a gross distortion of history,” the WJC wrote on X/Twitter.

The statement followed a post that Albanese made to the platform on Monday, where she wrote, “Our collective obliviousness to what led, 100 years ago, to the Third Reich’s expansionism and the genocide of people not in conformity with the “pure race” is asinine. And it is leading to the commission of yet another genocide, yet another regional war and potentially yet another global one.”

Albanese’s history of Holocaust inversion

Albanese has a well-documented history of making comparisons between Israel and Israeli figures to Nazi Germany and Adolph Hitler.

In July, Albanese expressed support on X for a post comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.

“This is precisely what I was thinking today,” the UN rapporteur wrote in reply to a post by UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber, who shared an image on X of Hitler raising his hand while moving through a crowd on top of a photo of Netanyahu amid a crowd of congresspeople….

Yes, of course. A photograph of Netanyahu at the U.S. Congress should put one immediately in mind of a Nazi rally, with Hitler’s supporters heil-hitlering as he moved through a mesmerized and adoring crowd. What an apt comparison that came so swimmingly to the perverse mind of Francesca Albanese.

“This blatant Holocaust inversion and antisemitism weaponizes the tragedy of the Jewish people to demonize Israel,” the WJC added in its Monday statement.

In response to a January 21 post on X by anti-Israel figure Mohammed El-Kurd, where the Palestinian activist claimed that Zionism was colonial and responsible for the “genocide” in Gaza, Albanese replied that her understanding of anti-Palestinian racism was shaped by the historical European racism toward Jews that led to the Holocaust.

Of course. In Albanese’s mind, the Jews are now doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews. By studying the history of European antisemitism that led to the Holocaust, Albanese claims she better understands how the Israeli dehumanization of the Palestinians has inexorably led to the “genocide” in Gaza.

But of course, there is no “genocide” in Gaza. No gas chambers. No mobile killing vans. No cattle cars stuffed with the bodies of the suffocated. No open pits where victims, shot in the back of their heads, then topple into them. No, none of that. The IDF has done everything it can to minimize the deaths of Palestinian civilians. It has instituted a system of warning civilians away from areas and buildings that are about to be targeted. Already by March, the IDF had dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million text messages, and made sixteen million robocalls, all in order to warn civilians away from danger. About half of all airstrikes in Gaza are aborted, too, by Israeli pilots if they detect too many civilians near the intended target. These warnings, and these missions called-off do not bespeak a policy of “genocide.” The only people calling for “genocide” are those who belong to or support Hamas, whose aim is to destroy the state of Israel and to kill or expel all of its Jewish inhabitants.

Francesca Albanese does not dare to discuss the IDF’s extensive warnings for civilians. Nor has she mentioned the key metric for judging whether a war is being fought with sufficient attention to preserving civilian lives. That is the civilian-to-combatant ratio. The UN has said that in all the wars fought since 1945, that ratio has been 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans managed to bring that down to 4:1, and in Iraq, to 3:1. But in Gaza, the Israelis have managed to bring that ratio below 1:1, a staggering achievement. How is that ratio calculated? As of mid-October, the Hamas-run Health Ministry — given to exaggeration — has said that 42,000 Gazans have died. The IDF now calculates it has killed at least 19,000 combatants. In addition, before the war about 800 Gazans died each month from diseases (cancer, heart disease, etc.) and accidents; assuming that number has remained the same, over the past year 9600 Gazans died of such non-combat related causes.

That means that the total number of Gazan civilians who died as a result of the IDF campaign in Gaza should be calculated as follows: 42,000 total, from which we should deduct 19,000 Hamas combatants, giving a figure of 23,000, and further deduct 9600 dead from diseases and accidents, which leads to a figure of 13,400. The civilian-to-combatant ratio, then, is 13,400:19,000, which is far less than 1:1, an achievement that is unsurpassed in the history of modern warfare. But that doesn’t matter to Francesca Albanese. She knows the Israelis are the new Nazis, ready to murder every man, woman, and child, not just in Gaza, but in Israel itself, including the West Bank.

Who whips up hatred of the Jewish state by condemning the Israelis as Nazis? Who repeatedly maligns the IDF, that does everything it can to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, by claiming it is committing “genocide”? Who is the foremost promoter of antisemitic hatred — thinly disguised as anti-Zionism — in the world today? I think Francesca Albanese deserves that title. Don’t you agree?