UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese apologized today (Monday) for claims that the Nazis called Jews in the concentration who were being taken to the gas chambers to be exterminated "Muslims" and admitted that she had misunderstood the meaning of the term "antisemitism."
"I sincerely apologize," Albanese wrote on X. "I misread the term 'Muselmann' (Muslim) used in Nazi camps for prisoners at the brink of death, wrongly inferring that the term antisemitism originally meant hatred of all Semitic peoples. In fact it was coined specifically to denote hatred of Jews."
Albanese had previously written: “In fact, when they were being taken to the gas chambers, there are some accounts of life in the concentration camps saying that Jews were called ‘the Muslims.’"
She made this statement during a larger argument claiming that "antisemitism" is not hatred of Jews specifically, but hatred of all "semitic" people.
“When the word ‘antisemitism’ was coined, it referred to anyone who was not European and who came from the Middle East," Albanese said, adding that the term only came to be associated with Jews because Jews were the largest non-Christian minority in Europe at the time.
Certain Jewish prisoners in the death camps who were on the verge of death or were resigned to death were called "Muselmann." According to Yad Vashem, the term referred to the prisoners' inability to stand at the end and some scholars believe it was used as a reference to the Muslim custom of prostrating on the ground during prayer.
The term "antisemitism" was first coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to give hatred of Jews a veneer of scientific legitimacy, and has always referred to hatred of Jews specifically. In recent years, a growing movement on the far-left has attempted to redefine antisemitism away from its historic meaning to include hatred of Arabs and Muslims in addition to, and sometimes instead of, hatred of Jews.
Albanese herself has been at the center of numerous controversies in which she has been credibly accused of antisemitism. In February, she was condemned by several European Union foreign ministers for comments made at an Al Jazeera conference, in which Albanese had 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 attack in Israel which Albanese described as an act that must be viewed in “context" and as a response to Israeli “aggression."