Professor Anne Bayefsky, President of Human Rights Voices and Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, spoke with Arutz Sheva - Israel National News about UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's statement at an Al Jazeera event last week that Israel is the "common enemy" of humanity.
"It is important to understand just who Francesca Albanese is. She is an antisemite who speaks as a purportedly qualified, respectable UN 'expert,' a person who flies around the world at UN expense, who is entitled to put out press releases, statements, and reports that are reproduced, archived, and made accessible online to students, teachers, the press, legislators, and the general public everywhere. Her Jew hatred spreads. The closest analogue is Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels," Prof. Bayefsky stated.
"The real question is why this is allowed to continue," she wondered. "Why there is yet another news story about the UN’s Albanese and her antisemitic rantings. On this occasion, it’s about Jews being guilty of world financial domination and the common enemy of humankind. To her Al Jazeera audience, she said: 'Instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed, given it political excuses…We, who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms, and weapons, we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy.'"
Prof. Bayefsky said there is more the US could do to combat the antisemitism coming from the UN and Albanese in particular. "While Albanese is subject to visa restrictions barring her from the United States, and the US college campus tours she took during the Biden administration, the fact is that the current U.S. administration has not done what is necessary to shut her down. It says Americans don’t pay her costs, but the administration has not adopted a policy of cutting off the Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, which directly and indirectly bankrolls Albanese and all the apparatus that operates behind her."
"At the end of December, the US administration voted in favor of the UN General Assembly resolution that bankrolls the UN. They did so knowing that UN money is fungible and is used to cover Albanese’s costs. And knowing that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has done absolutely nothing to remove her, or even call for her removal, or admit she is a stain on the entire organization. And knowing that Guterres continues to publish and disseminate her dangerous, lethal antisemitic trash under UN auspices," she said.
"So, no doubt, she feels free to continue to spew antisemitism worldwide, which is the actual stain on humanity," Professor Bayefsky concluded.
Albanese made the remarks at the Al Jazeera Forum on Saturday, during a panel titled, "The Palestinian Cause in a World Moving Toward Multipolarity." Khaled Mashaal, one of the leaders of the Hamas terrorist organization, spoke at the same event.
Albanese's anti-Israel bias was first exposed in 2022, in the form of antisemitic posts she made on social media, in which she claimed that the “Jewish lobby" controls the US.
In December 2023, Albanese called a demand that Hamas release the 251 hostages it kidnapped on October 7, including small children and 9-month-old Kfir Bibas, "unacceptable." She has never called for the release of the hostages who were kept in Gaza. She has, however, called for the release of a Gaza hospital director who was arrested on suspicion of being a Hamas leader.
Shortly after the October 7th massacre, Albanese published a book titled 'J'Accuse,' co-opting the title of a famous essay calling out the antisemitism of the infamous Dreyfus trial for a work in which she attempted to shift the blame for the massacre from the Hamas perpetrators to Israel.
Albanese has also denied that Israel has the right to self-defense against Hamas even after October 7.