"A UN official investigating Israeli activities in the Palestinian territories said Thursday that her past statements claiming the ‘Jewish lobby’ controls the US were not antisemitic.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, said during a 2014 conflict between Israel and Gaza terror groups that the ‘Jewish lobby’ had taken control of the US, that the ‘Israel lobby’ controlled the BBC and that Israel started the war out of greed.
The Times of Israel uncovered the comments in Albanese’s social media history and revealed them in a Wednesday report.
In her first public statement since the report, Albanese decried ‘yet another malicious attack’ against her office and said the criticism was motivated by politics.
She said her comments were ‘wrongly mischaracterized as antisemitic,’ and the report was ‘decontextualized and disingenuous extrapolation.’
Taking a shot at the US mission to the UN in Geneva, which said it was ‘appalled’ by her antisemitism, Albanese said, ‘Should anyone feel the urge to be ‘appalled’ about something, please consider the 215 Palestinians killed this year.’
It wasn’t clear what figure she was referring to. According to the UN’s own statistics, 168 Palestinians have been killed this year. Israeli officials have said many of them — but not all — were killed while carrying out attacks or during clashes with security forces.
Albanese also said six Israeli ‘soldiers and settlers’ have been killed in 2022. Palestinian attacks have killed 31 people so far this year.
‘This is the oppressive reality that the politically-motivated attacks against my mandate are trying to obscure,’ she said. ‘I will not let anyone define who I am and what I stand for.’
She promised ‘further clarifications’ on her comments, but in a previous statement to The Times of Israel, she acknowledged ‘mistakes’ in her past rhetoric and sought to distance herself from the remarks.
‘Some of the words I used during Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip in 2014, were infelicitous, analytically inaccurate, and unintendedly offensive,’ she said last week.
‘People make mistakes. I distance myself from these words, which I would not use today.’
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also defended Albanese on Thursday, calling condemnation of her remarks a ‘coordinated assault.’
‘Such coordinated attacks are old and tried tactics that must not be dignified as credible or factual,’ the ministry said.
‘Such attempts at character assassination are further proof that the defenders of Israeli occupation and its crimes and those complicit in such crimes have no logical or fact-based response to Ms. Albanese’s sound legal assessment of the situation in Palestine,’ it said, calling on all countries and the UN to reject criticism of her antisemitism.
Special rapporteurs are appointed by the Human Rights Council and carry out their mandate independently. The Human Rights Council has not responded to a request for comment.
A UN official, Craig Mokhiber, the director of the New York Office for UN Human Rights, defended Albanese, calling criticism a ‘ridiculous campaign of slander’ and a ‘tired old trick’ and implied that her detractors are ‘evil.’
References to Jews and Jewish lobbies wielding disproportionate power are viewed as antisemitic because they conjure age-old tropes and conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world from the shadows. Many of those stereotypes also depict Jews as greedy..."