By Seth Mandel
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Outgoing anti-Semitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt has done
much for the Jewish community over her long career as an educator and writer in
the battle against Holocaust denial. Now she has done one more service:
revealing that even among the top brass of the United Nations, Francesca
Albanese is properly regarded as a blight on humanity.
Lipstadt, according
to Jewish Insider, objected to Albanese’s ostentatious Jew-baiting
directly to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres twice; twice, Guterres
responded: “She’s a horrible person.”
Though the candor is appreciated, Albanese—the UN special
envoy to the Palestinian territories—is in fact so very much more than that.
She is a figure of rare menace and depravity. She is “Globalize the Intifada”
in human form, a sort of wandering dybbuk serving as a vessel for the unrested
spirits of 20th century genocidal anti-Semitism.
Although Albanese’s UN appointment comes without a
salary, the “world body” for whom she speaks is funded disproportionately by
America. Albanese implicates the Western world, its governments and its
citizens, in the privileged and unaccountable spread of the world’s oldest
hatred at its strongest moment in decades.
We can take a brief tour through some of Albanese’s
greatest hits, though Albanese is always adding new and fresh examples. Indeed,
her prolific output would be seen as evidence of an admirable work ethic were
it put to use toward something that wasn’t unambiguously evil.
Still, she’s been at this a while. There’s her 2014 rant
to the BBC that “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
nightmare caused once again by Israel’s greed,” similar to her insistence
that America is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” There’s her vocal, in-person support
for Hamas as recent as 2022; her full-throated
call for everyone to “stand with” disgraced anti-Zionist professor David
Miller; her assertion
that “many Jewish people worldwide,” specifically those who support Israel,
“live a lie”; her belief
that only a “few” Israelis are non-genocidal.
One of my favorite recent Albanesisms, we might call
them, took the form of a conversation on X. After bashing the IDF as “rotten to
the core,” another user responded to her that Jewish cruelty was without limit.
“Jews are capable of eating human flesh,” they said. To which Albanese responded: “Do
not attribute what Israel does to all Jewish people, please.” Sort of a
backhanded compliment, I’d say, that we’re not all flesh eaters but we’ll take
what we can get from Francesca.
When called upon for her “expertise” and to speak with
the imprimatur of the United Nations, she rattles off Israeli
crimes such as, in one breath: “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide,
cultural genocide and, more recently, ecocide.”
Though it may seem slightly insane that this person has
been granted academic legitimacy, it’s true. She is an affiliate
scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at
Georgetown University. (Talk about scholasticide!)
Albanese’s Georgetown biography touts her years with
UNRWA, the Hamas-adjacent UN agency that has been found to have numerous
employees in Gaza-based terror groups and others who took part in Oct. 7 or who
held Israeli hostages, as well as her other work with UN agencies.
The Georgetown bio also makes much of her co-authorship
of a new and updated version of Lex Takkenberg’s 1998 book on Palestinians and
international refugee law. And this is where Albanese’s influence can be seen
on the development of so-called “scholarship” meant to retroactively shape
international law around whatever concepts are most useful toward the cause of
seeking Israel’s destruction.
UNRWA’s existence has been at the center of debate in
recent weeks. Over the past 15 months of war since Oct. 7, 2023, UNRWA
employees’ complicity has been revealed to be staggering. Some were recorded on
video taking part in the Hamas murder spree, others were found to have held
hostages, UNRWA facilities doubled as Hamas communications command spaces or
weapons depots or entrances to Hamas’s underground terror-tunnel network. The
UN refused to take sufficient action to clean out the rot, so in October the
Israeli Knesset passed
legislation greatly limiting UNRWA’s legal approval to work in Gaza and the
West Bank.
UNRWA exists solely to cater to the Palestinians despite
the existence of a wider UN refugee agency. This is to keep the Palestinians
stateless and under a different definition of “refugee”—one that simply has no
basis in law and serves solely to perpetuate the conflict. Takkenberg’s first
edition of his book was careful to note that “the refugee concept, embodied in
the UNRWA definition, does not necessarily coincide with the one generally
employed in the context of international refugee law.” Albanese’s 2020
revision, on the other hand, spends a great deal of time and energy blurring
this line and rationalizing the trend of treating the UNRWA refugee
classification as a legal imperative not until the Palestinians are repatriated
but rather until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself is resolved.
Albanese may appear to be a ridiculous character, but she
has colonized the institutional power and reach of the UN to disfigure
international law in the pursuit of the destruction of the Jewish state. So,
yes, she is a “horrible person.” But shouldn’t that appellation be applied to
anyone who materially enables her, Mr. Secretary-General?
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