Francesca Albanese, Raving Antisemite

Francesca Albanese is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights In The Occupied Palestinian Territories. She has acquired quite a reputation for spewing anti-Israel and antisemitic venom. As National Review reported last February, “She said that the victims were killed in reaction to ‘Israel’s oppression’ rather than because of their Jewish identity.

She has written that “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.

Those all-powerful Jews who hold entire countries, or even the world, in thrall, is the favorite charge of antisemites. And today’s Jews, Albanese claims, use the Holocaust as emotional blackmail, in order to keep Europe from condemning Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. Really? Don’t European street demonstrators, European politicians, European media all join in condemning the embattled state of Israel?

The UN reported this in March 2024:

Francesca Albanese was speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, where she presented her latest report, entitled ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, during an interactive dialogue with Member States.

“Following nearly six months of unrelenting Israeli assault on occupied Gaza, it is my solemn duty to report on the worst of what humanity is capable of, and to present my findings,” she said.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide…has been met.”

Apparently Israel is a “settler-colonial state” from its very birth. It is illegitimate, a country built on land that it stole from its rightful owners, the Palestinians. Never mind the 3,500-year history of Jews in the land that makes them the true indigenes, who were there 2000 years before Muslims existed. Forget about the late invention — in the 1960s— of the “Palestinian people” for propaganda reasons. Just keep repeating, as Albanese does, that Israel, where Jews now live in their ancient commonwealth, is a “settler-colonial state” and hope that the charge will stick.

Now she has accused Israeli prison guards of murdering — by repeated anal rape with a broomstick — a Palestinian doctor, Adnan Al-Bursh. More on her charge can be found here: “Francesca Albanese alleges Palestinian doctor ‘likely raped to death’ in Israeli detention,” Jerusalem Post, November 18, 2024:

UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese alleged that Palestinian doctor Adnan Al-Bursh was sexually abused until his death while in Israeli detention, according to a post to her X/Twitter account on Monday.

Albanese wrote, “A doctor. A stellar surgeon. The embodiment of Palestinian ethics. Likely raped to death.”

“The racism of Western media who are not covering this, and Western politicians who are not denouncing this, together with the thousand other testimonies and allegations of rape and other forms of mistreatment and torture that Palestinians have suffered in Israeli jails, is absolutely sickening,” Albanese said.

The reason the Western media is not “covering this” so-called rape is because — even though that media will always report the worst about Israel — it cannot report something for which there is not a shred of evidence. That silence, even from the anti-Israel BBC, is the best evidence that the story is untrue. But when has that ever stopped Francesca Albanese from making her false claims about Israel?

At the time Al-Bursh’s death was announced in early May by two Palestinian associations, neither one mentioned a “rape.” And Francesca Albanese herself deplored the death of Al-Bursh, but also failed to mention a “rape.” It seems that only now, seven months later, she has decided to make her sensational charge. And why not? What is to keep her from making it? She has decided that Gaza is Auschwitz and the Israelis the new Nazis. There is no charge about Israel that is too absurd or malign for her to make.

Palestinian prisoners are the sole source of stories about “abuse” at Sde Teiman and about the claim of “rape” — that is, the insertion of a broomstick into his anus — of Al-Bursh. Do we have any reason to believe them? Don’t the Palestinians have a long record of maligning Israelis with wild charges? And why is it that the BBC, that never passes up a chance to malign Israel, has not carried a story about Al-Bursh being “raped to death”? Is that because it knows, or strongly suspects, that the story is false?

And what more will it take for Francesca Albanese, a raving antisemite, to be removed from her job as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights In The Occupied Palestinian Territories? Perhaps the Trump administration, as a condition for continued American financial support for the UN, can demand her removal.