Francesca Albanese: the sneering face of international Israelophobia

Simon Schama, the mild-mannered and eminent historian, is not known for his furious manner or intemperate style. Moreover, given his Lithuanian Jewish mother and Sephardi father, and his intellectual focus on the history of Jewish persecution, he is not normally given to Holocaust comparisons. Yesterday, however, he did just that: ‘Nice to know your latest Nazi’, he tweeted of a particular public figure.

The fact that this uncharacteristic response was in reference to a senior employee of the United Nations is a sad indictment of the times in which 7 October 2023 has left us. The woman in question was, of course, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In her four years in office, she has brought deep disgrace upon her institution and become known as the sneering face of international Israelophobia.

Appearing in an interview with Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned news channel, she said: ‘We now see that we, as a humanity, have a common enemy.’ The name of that enemy? You guessed it: Israel.

You can see what Schama meant. Consider, for instance, a comparable quotation: ‘[We] must remind them again and again of the true enemy of our present-day world… and dedicate to the general anger the evil enemy of mankind, as the true cause of all suffering.’ Where is that passage to be found? Mein Kampf.

The dark truth is that although Adolf Hitler’s ideology was largely stamped out in Europe after the Second World War, it lived on in the Arab world, before being latterly taken up by the Western left.

Check the history. As I explored in my 2023 book, Israelophobia, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs during the war years was Amin al-Husseini, who travelled to Berlin, met Hitler and became part of the Nazi project.

Chief among his various tasks, such as recruiting men for the Waffen-SS Handschar Division, a Bosnian Muslim unit under SS command, was the production of Arabic Nazi propaganda. Husseini became a prolific radio broadcaster, pumping hour after hour of Third Reich Jew hatred into the Middle East, translated into Arabic and presented in a style to which Muslims could relate.

One 1944 broadcast, uncovered by American historian Jeffrey Herf, a leading expert in this area of scholarship, displayed the typical cocktail of Nazi racism and Islamist fanaticism. ‘While the Arabs are lavishly generous, the Jews are meanly miserly’, the announcer intoned:

‘While the Arabs are courageous and warlike, the Jews are cowardly and fearful. The differences between the two races were the reason for the enduring enmity which has always existed between them. We therefore believe that this enmity and strife between Arabs and Jews will always be maintained until one of the two races is destroyed.’

Again, you can see Schama’s point.

Albanese is Italian, not Arab nor Muslim. But the liberal elites, whether at the UN or in other global institutions, have since the Cold War become greatly influenced by an anti-Western dogma that has been played upon by jihadists and other enemies of freedom.

As a result, the UN has long been a battleground, with the Kremlin and the Third World against the West, and in which the West has increasingly been acquiescent in its own subversion. Foremost of the Western targets has been the state of Israel, the only meaningful democracy in the Middle East.

Yasser Arafat, who enjoyed a close relationship with the USSR, repeated the Soviets’ Israelophobic propaganda, which blended with Nazi ideas, almost word-for-word in speeches at the UN. In his famous 1974 ‘gun and olive branch’ address to the General Assembly, he railed against ‘imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism, the chief form of which is Zionism’.

The nadir came in 1975, when after nearly a decade of Arab and Soviet lobbying, the UN passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, ventriloquising the central agitprop motif that ‘Zionism is racism‘. For years, the Kremlin had been trying to persuade the world that Zionism was an expression of Jewish racial superiority, a modern manifestation of a supposed chosen-people complex. Having it adopted by a UN resolution was a propaganda coup.

As Spectator journalist Goronwy Rees despairingly reflected at the time: ‘The fundamental thesis… was that to be a Jew, and to be proud of it, and to be determined to preserve the right to be a Jew, is to be an enemy of the human race.’ The UN resolution – which prompted British Students’ Unions to ban Jewish societies on campuses – was only repealed in 1991, with the fall of Communism.

Albanese sits squarely in the tradition of this Soviet anti-Zionist agitprop. Born near Naples, she grew up in the world of ‘progressive’ academia, with a master’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, which is dominated by pseudo-radical thought to this day.

Naturally, she went on to join the UN, where she found her calling as its foremost anti-Israel provocateur. She has frequently accused the Jewish state of ‘apartheid’, one of the principal smears invented by Soviet propagandists, seemingly overlooking Israel’s Arab politicians, leaders of industry, soldiers, judges and footballers on the national team. (The Israeli state even recognises and funds Sharia family courts to cater for its Muslim minority.)

Again echoing Soviet disinformation, Albanese has compared Israeli actions with the Nazi Holocaust and in 2014, contended that the US had been ‘subjugated by the Jewish lobby’. After a global backlash, she apologised, but it set the tone for much of her perspective since.

It was 7 October that catapulted her to new heights of provocative extremism. On the day of Hamas’s massacre of Israelis, she posted that ‘today’s violence must be put in context’, but never extended the same dignity to Israel’s military response. This, of course, she wrongly labelled a ‘genocide’, wilfully ignoring the ‘context’ of a just and defensive war.

Bizarrely, Albanese even argued that ‘the victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression’, making a defence of Hamas that even the jihadis themselves have, to my knowledge, failed to make.

Last year, US secretary of state Marco Rubio sanctioned Albanese for ‘illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt International Criminal Court action against US and Israeli officials, companies and executives’. In a resolute post on X, Rubio added: ‘Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated. We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defence.’

That summed it up. Setting aside China and Russia, in crude terms, the great global power struggle of our age places Israel and the US on the one side, much of the Muslim world on the other, and Britain / Europe pulled hither and thither in the middle.

People like Albanese hold fast to an ideology that causes them to kick against the pillars of our civilisation relentlessly. What they don’t seem to realise is that if they are successful, and the roof comes crashing in, they will end up just as dead as the rest of us.

Jake Wallis Simons is author of Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself.