From the Liveblog of
Friday, July 26, 2024
UN expert endorses social media post comparing Netanyahu to Hitler; Israel slams her for ‘antisemitism’
A United Nations rights expert has endorsed a social media post comparing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, drawing rebuke from Israel and the US.
Yesterday, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, responded to a post on X that featured a picture of Hitler being celebrated by a crowd with Nazi salutes and cheers above a shot of Netanyahu being greeted by US congressmen this week.
UN Special Rapporteur Albanese is beyond redemption. Once again she spreads vile hatred and abuses the memory of the Holocaust.
It is inconceivable that @FranceskAlbs is still allowed to use the @UN as a shield to spread antisemitism. #UNseatAlbanese pic.twitter.com/Gy4kHi3KNp
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) July 25, 2024
“History is always watching,” Craig Mokhiber, a former UN human rights official who resigned late last October after accusing the world body of failing to prevent the “genocide” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, wrote in the post.
“This is precisely what I was thinking today,” Albanese, an independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2022 but who does not speak on behalf of the UN, said in her response.
Albanese has faced harsh criticism from Israel in the past, especially after she presented a report in March accusing the country of committing genocide in its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Israel rejected the report at the time as an “obscene inversion of reality.”
Last night, Israel slammed the UN rights expert for “antisemitism,” calling her “beyond redemption.”
“It is inconceivable that Albanese is still allowed to use the UN as a shield to spread anti-Semitism,” it says.
Israel’s mission to the UN in Geneva also chimes in.
“When a current UN ‘expert’ endorses Holocaust distortion spread by the former (UN rights office) director in New York… the system is rotten to its core,” it says.
“It’s high time to #UNseatAlbanese!”
Israel’s new ambassador in Geneva, Daniel Meron, uses the same hashtag, decrying that “Francesca Albanese abuses her (UN) title to spread hatred and inflammatory rhetoric.”
Washington also weighs in, with US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva Michele Taylor writing on X that the comparison of Netanyahu to Hitler is “reprehensible and antisemitic.”
“There should be no place for such dehumanizing rhetoric. Special rapporteurs should be striving to improve human rights challenges, not inflame them,” she adds.
Albanese hits back at the criticism, insisting in a follow-up post on X that “the memory of the Holocaust remains intact and sacred thanks to people of conscience worldwide.”
“Institutional rants and outbursts of selective moral outrage will not stop the course of justice, which is finally in motion,” she writes.
