US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz said on Tuesday that UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese had threatened American companies with “criminal liability".
In a post on social media, Waltz wrote that Albanese, to whom he referred as “the UN's leading in-house Hamas propagandist", had sent “baseless threats to American companies using UN letterhead threatening ‘criminal liability’ (as if she had that authority) for merely working with a US ally", presumably referring to Israel.
“What an abuse of the UN's resources that could be better spent helping people and resolving conflict. This is why she is sanctioned," added the US Ambassador.
Albanese, who is notorious for her anti-Israel bias, last year sent letters to two pro-Israel US Christian groups in which she accused them of complicity in “gross human rights violations," war crimes, crimes against humanity and apartheid, due to their connections to Israel. The two groups sued Albanese for defamation and libel.
Albanese has repeatedly come under fire over her anti-Israel bias. She was recently condemned by several European Union foreign ministers for comments made at an Al Jazeera conference, in which Albanese said: “The fact that instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed, given Israel political excuses, political sheltering, economic and financial support ... We who do not control large amounts of financial capitals, algorithms and weapons, we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy."
Albanese later claimed in an interview that she "never, ever, ever said ‘Israel is the common enemy of humanity,'" calling the accusations "completely false accusations."
Albanese’s history of anti-Israel statements and actions is well-documented and dates back to social media posts uncovered in 2022, in which she claimed that the “Jewish lobby" controls the US.
At the time, Albanese rejected arguments that the comments about the “Jewish lobby" were antisemitic and claimed they were “mischaracterized", but her anti-Israel bias has continued to be exposed since.
Her criticism of Israel has grown since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 murderous attack in Israel which Albanese described as an act that must be viewed in “context" and as a response to Israeli “aggression."
Just last week, Albanese claimed that the world has given Israel "a license to torture Palestinians", alleging that "torture has effectively become state policy" in Israel.
Responding to the comments, Israel's mission in Geneva said in a statement, "Francesca Albanese is not a promoter of human rights; she is an agent of chaos... and any document she produces is nothing but a politically-charged, activist rant."
Albanese "advocates dangerous extremist narratives to undermine the very existence of the State of Israel", it said.