"Scholars" defense of Fransesca Albanese's antisemitism reveals astounding hypocrisy

A statement was just released by "64 scholars denouncing the smear campaign against UN human rights rapporteur Francesca Albanese."

Of course, they have to somehow skate around the fact that she wrote that America is subjugated by the Jewish lobby, a classic antisemitic trope.

So they try to gaslight the world:

Once again, a high-ranking UN official defending the human rights of the Palestinians is being castigated, based on disingenuous allegations of antisemitism. This time, the trigger for such allegations is a statement Ms. Albanese made in 2014, excavated from a personal letter about Israel’s attack on Gaza she had shared on Facebook. 

Indeed, Ms. Albanese said therein ‘America is subjugated by the Jewish lobby’. But first, she has rightly distanced herself from this inappropriate choice of words, and second, it is clear from the context of her statement that she was referring to pressure groups that are commonly referred to as the ‘Israel lobby’. Books have been written including by Jewish scholars about such groups. They legitimately exist and their influence, however effective, on American foreign policy towards Israel is real, in particular when it comes to blocking any initiatives aimed at holding Israel accountable for its inhumane treatment of the Palestinians.

When Special Rapporteur Albanese is delegitimized and stigmatized as an antisemite based on isolated and decontextualized statements, this amounts to political abuse of antisemitism, which fundamentally harms the urgent and important fight against antisemitism.

Let's look at their defense of Albanese.

First, they claim that it was "excavated" from a "personal letter" she shared. No, by definition, sharing a letter makes it an open letter, written to the world, to raise funds for UNWRA. 

Then they claim that she  "distanced herself" from that choice of words. Yes, but only when she was called on it - and even then, she denied that the phrase was antisemitic.

Third, they claim that in the context of the statement she was clearly talking about the "Israel lobby," not the "Jewish lobby," and that her critics are taking it out of context. This is another lie: in context, she wrote, "America and Europe, subjugated by both the Jewish lobby and the guilt for the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed - the Palestinians - who defend themselves with the only means they have..."

She is saying that Europe is "subjugated" by guilt for the Holocaust in the same breath that America is "subjugated" by the "Jewish lobby." She is saying that America and Europe are both beholden to not upsetting Jews. In context, it is very obvious that her "Jewish lobby" comment refers to Jews, not AIPAC, or else the Europe part of the sentence makes no sense.

But let's pretend that Albanese really meant "Israel Lobby," not "Jewish Lobby." It is still antisemitic - even according to these "scholars!"

You see, many of the same "scholars" who signed this letter also signed the  Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which is meant as an anti-Zionst alternative to the IHRA Working Definition. Aleida Assmann, Leora Auslander, Angelika Bammer, Omer Bartov, Peter Beinart, Michael Berkowitz, Daniel Boyarin, Jose Brunner, Stephen Clingman, Raya Cohen, Alon Confino, all signed  both - and that is only through "C." There is a very large overlap between the signatories to this statement and the JDA.

Now, what does the Jerusalem Declaration say about examples of speech about Israel "that, on the face of it, are antisemitic"?  The first one is, "Applying the symbols, images and negative stereotypes of classical antisemitism (see guidelines 2 and 3) to the State of Israel."

Guideline 2 says, "What is particular in classic antisemitism is the idea that Jews are linked to the forces of evil. This stands at the core of many anti-Jewish fantasies, such as the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in which “the Jews” possess hidden power that they use to promote their own collective agenda at the expense of other people. This linkage between Jews and evil continues in the present: in the fantasy that “the Jews” control governments with a “hidden hand,”... 

Albanese is saying that Jews/Israelis have power over both the US and Europe, power that she is exposing in her letter. Note that she didn't say that the US and Europe are "influenced"  (as the statement claims) or even "pressured" by the Lobby - she says that they are subjugated. That means that Jews/"Zionists" control the US and Europe. 

Even dedicated anti-Zionists are on the record as saying that this is antisemitic - including many of the people who signed this statement!

These hypocritical scholars are ignoring their own definition of antisemitism in their zeal to exonerate Albanese.

Ironically, the JDA was written to allow people to freely attack (and boycott) Israel without being called antisemitic, but Albanese even crossed their own extraordinarily high bar for when attacking Israel is considered antisemitic.  

They themselves are guilty of what they accuse Albanese's critics of: "this amounts to political abuse of antisemitism, which fundamentally harms the urgent and important fight against antisemitism."

Which shows the level of integrity of the anti-Israel crowd: Exactly zero.

(h/t GnasherJew)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Francesca Albanese's "Jewish lobby" Facebook post also includes a blood libel (UPDATE)

There has been a lot of coverage of UNHRC Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's antisemitic posts on social media, including one post where she said, "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 — the Palestinians — who defend themselves with the only means they have."

But in that same post, Albanese also engaged in a blood libel - falsely accusing Israel of killing a baby.

She wrote (translated):

Meanwhile, Gaza needs help, medicine, food, water. Everything we can give is a small but essential help to save more innocent lives. Like that of little Shayman, who after being born by her dying mother due to bombings, was rescued and kept in an incubator by medical staff in Gaza. The miracle of his life went off when Israel bombed Gaza’s only power supply source, and the Shayman’s incubator stopped working.

I cannot find any mention of any child dying from an incubator losing power in 2014.

Human Rights Watch wrote about the effects of Israel's (unintentional) bombing of Gaza's power plant fuel supply after Albanese's post. Here is everything it said about how the power plant going offline affected hospitals in Gaza:

The shutdown of the Gaza Power Plant ...caused hospitals, already straining to handle the surge of war casualties, to increase their reliance on precarious generators.

Mahmoud Daher, head of the Gaza office of the UN World Health Organization, said that hospitals have been given priority for scarce electricity, with Shifa, the territory’s largest hospital, getting the most, at 16 hours a day. If the fuel required to run generators were to run out, or a generator to fail, a hospital could lose power.

An official at al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City told Human Rights Watch on August 7 that because of electricity interruptions:

We use a large generator for six to eight hours per day, then have to rely on three smaller ones, because the large one cannot be run full-time. If the large one goes, we don’t know how we would repair it, because of the lack of spare parts. It powers the oxygen station, the hospital’s two elevators, and the air conditioners – this amounts to 80 percent of the hospital’s total electricity consumption. When we use the smaller generators, they can only power one elevator, and none of the air conditioners, which makes it difficult for staff to work long hours in the August heat, and dangerous for patients.

 If the power outages had shut down incubators, HRW would have mentioned it. If anyone died as a result of such power outages, HRW would have made that the headline. So would have every media outlet.

Albanese's story about "Shayman" and his "dying mother" is a lie. It never happened. It is a blood libel.

Not only that, her relating that story that was not mentioned in any mainstream media proves that Albanese reads and trusts the most fringe, anti-Israel and antisemitic Arab media, and believes even the most outrageous lies about Jews and Israelis implicitly.

So this pattern holds: Francesca Albanese is an antisemite.

UPDATE: GnasherJew found the story that I couldn't find. There was a baby on a respirator, not an incubator. Other news stories say the doctors were watching her closely, and it seems unlikely to me that the oxygen wouldn't be a top priority for generators in a hospital. 

The six-day-old baby was born by emergency Caesarean section Friday after doctors at Deir al-Balah hospital in central Gaza managed to save her from the womb of her mother, who died when an Israeli tank shell hit her home.

The mother, 23-year-old Shayma al-Sheikh Qanan, had been eight months pregnant, and the baby was named after her.

But the baby was deprived of oxygen between her mother’s death and doctors being able to operate, which meant she had to be hooked up to a respirator at the maternity ward in Khan Yunis hospital in southern Gaza.

“The baby suffered an oxygen deficiency in the womb after her mother’s heart stopped,” Dr Abdel Karem al-Bawab, head of the maternity ward at Nasser hospital, told AFP Thursday.

“This deficiency caused the baby to asphyxiate unexpectedly, rendering her brain dead,” he said of the tragedy, which occurred Wednesday.

“The ongoing electricity shortages played a role because her oxygen tubes did not work properly and we had to resuscitate her more than once manually.”

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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@HRW and @FranceskAlbs defend a convicted terrorist as a fellow "human rights defender"

From Human Rights Watch:

 Israeli authorities should immediately release the French-Palestinian human rights worker Salah Hamouri from administrative detention and reverse the decision to revoke his residency status in his native Jerusalem, Human Rights Watch said today.

...The military courts based their decisions to detain him on secret information they allege points to Hamouri’s involvement in the activities of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian political movement with an armed wing. 

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese tweeted, "French-Palestinian Salah Hammouri is a human rights defender who has been persecuted for years. Israel may call him a 'terrorist' but the reality says otherwise. "

Let's look at reality.

HRW used to mention that the PFLP does not distinguish between its terror and "political" wings. Now it treats it as a political organization - even though nothing has changed.

The PFLP's own political platform explicitly supports terror: "It it is a natural right, and duty that the Palestinian people should defend itself, resist the occupation through various means of struggle, including armed struggle. ..[T]he form of armed struggle should be dealt with at each stage as a means to serve the inclusive political vision which is responsible for determining the function to be done at each stage of the struggle..."

And the PFLP still engages in terror. They were responsible for the murder of Rina Shnerb in 2019.

There is no doubt that Hamouri is a member of the PFLP, even though HRW says it is "alleged."  Here is an article (archived) from the PFLP website that calls him a "comrade" and notes that he planned to assassinate the Chief Rabbi of Israel - and he justified it years afterwards.

Comrade Salah Hamouri, the former Palestinian prisoner freed as part of the prisoner exchange on December 18, 2011, said upon his release that “there is no option for the Palestinian people except resistance, because it is the only way for us to achieve our people’s rights, our freedom, and our self-determination.”

He served nearly seven years in Israeli prison, charged with planning to assassinate Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the Shas party and the Chief Rabbi of Israel. “This man is and will remain a symbol of racism and fanaticism in Israel,” Hamouri said.

And when he says "resistance," he means murdering Jews. 

A PFLP envoy to Cuba claimed the organization supports human rights - and one of those human rights is to murder Israeli Jews. 

We reaffirm our commitment to our goals, principles and inalienable Palestinian national rights. Some of these have been recognized and approved by the norms, principles, conventions, international resolutions, international law and human rights. The first of these rights is the right of the Palestinian people to resist the occupation by all means and methods.

"All means and methods" means terrorism. And its main website is filled with praise and support for terror attacks. 

The PFLP is a terrorist organization. It is designated as such by the US, EU, Canada and other countries. No major Western nation distinguishes between a "political party" and "armed wing." Neither does the PFLP itself. This was something apparently created by Human Rights Watch.

But "human rights" leaders are claiming that this convicted and admitted terrorist, who calls for violence, is a "human rights defender." Which indicates that they subscribe to the PFLP philosophy that the first and most important human right is to murder Jews. 

(h/t GnasherJew)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More