A bipartisan group of US Congress members is calling on the UN to remove UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese due to her antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.
“These comments provide further proof of the deep-seated prejudice inherent to the United Nations” approach to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. We respectfully urge you to call for relieving Ms. Albanese of all official duties, help disband the Commission of Inquiry (COI) into Israel, and work towards ameliorating the deep-seated antisemitic and anti-Israel bias at the United Nations,” wrote the Congress members in the letter addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, and which was published this past Friday.
“On Friday, February 10, a Palestinian terrorist attacked a group of Israeli civilians at a bus station with his vehicle and murdered three, including a pair of young brothers only six and eight years old. Ms. Albanese has conspicuously refused to condemn the attack, instead offering only one-sided condemnation of Israel,” they added.
“A day prior to the attack, from her verified Twitter account, Albanese praised the mayor of Barcelona, who accused Israel of apartheid and severed Barcelona”s “sister city” relationship with Tel Aviv. Also, when challenged about her continued silence regarding last month”s Palestinian terrorist attack outside Jerusalem synagogue that murdered seven, Albanese repeated her assertion that Israel is a colonial, apartheid regime. These comments are part of a longstanding pattern of such statements condemned by members of the US Congress,” the lawmakers continued.
“Ms. Albanese has repeatedly refused to condemn terrorist attacks against Israelis while continuing her condemnations of Israel. For an official tasked with serving as an independent, neutral, and expert voice on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, her inexcusable silence against terrorism targeting Israelis and her outrageous and prejudicial remarks clearly reflect the irredeemable bias of her mandate,” the letter stated.
The lawmakers noted that “Albanese”s more recent comments only reaffirms and strengthens our assessment that the UN system is riven with bias. Her biased behaviors should have no place at the United Nations, and clearly demonstrate the lack of impartiality.”
“Again, we strongly urge you to call for severing all ties with Ms. Albanese, help disband the Commission of Inquiry into Israel, and recommit to a United Nations system free from antisemitic and anti-Israel bias. We hope that you will instead work to bring Israelis and Palestinians together to ensure security, peace, and prosperity for all, and request a detailed accounting of what you are doing to tackle the antisemitism and anti-Israel bias endemic in the UN system,” the letter concluded.
Some of the lawmakers signed to this letter also signed a letter dated January and which urged the UN to remove Albanese over antisemitic comments exposed by the Times of Israel website.
The site revealed that, in an open letter posted to her Facebook page in 2014, Albanese castigated the US and Europe for their conduct during Operation Protective Edge and wrote, “America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed &mdash the Palestinians &mdash who defend themselves with the only means they have (deranged missiles), instead of making Israel face its international law responsibilities.”
In another post from that year, which has since been hidden, Albanese referred to the Israel lobby and Israel”s greed in comments directed at the BBC over its coverage of the conflict.
Albanese later rejected arguments that the comments about the “Jewish lobby” were antisemitic.
