A Biased UN Rapporteur Gets Called Out by the Trump Administration

The sanctioning by the Trump administration of the United Nations’s special rapporteur for the Palestinians, Francesca Albanese, is a welcome step in combating the animus toward Israel that permeates Turtle Bay. Secretary Rubio, in announcing the sanctions, cites Ms. Albanese’s “illegitimate and shameful efforts” and “her campaign of political and economic warfare” against America and the Jewish state. Bravo to our top diplomat.The announcement of sanctions comes a month after the Trump administration sent a letter to the UN’s secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, urging him to fire Ms. Albanese for her “virulent antisemitism and support for terrorism.” The letter also alleged that notwithstanding Ms. Albanese’s claim to be an “international lawyer,” she is not qualified to practice law. The Anti-Defamation League accuses her of trading in “antisemitic tropes.” As Mr. Rubio notes, Ms. Albanese’s lobbying includes attempts to arrest Israeli and American officials. She “has directly engaged with the International Criminal Court in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries,” the secretary says in explaining the decision to sanction her. She also sent threats to “entities worldwide, including major American companies.”A Google co-founder, Sergei Brin, in a memorandum to staff working in the company’s artificial intelligence division, accused the UN of being “transparently antisemitic” after receiving one of Ms. Albanese’s letters. “Throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides,” he wrote. He adds that he would “be careful” citing the UN as an authority.Ms. Albanese reckons that the atrocities of October 7 ought to be placed in the “context of decades of oppression imposed on the Palestinians.” She has compared Prime Minister Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, blamed the war in Gaza for the 2024 wildfires in California, and calls Israel a “genocidal society.” She has also compared Israel’s democracy to the Taliban’s theocracy. Ms. Albanese reckons that supporters of Israel “live a lie.”The scandal is not that Ms. Albanese has now been sanctioned, but that it took so long, given that she was appointed in 2022. Ms. Albanese, though, is more a symptom of what an Israeli general, Benny Gantz, on Wednesday afternoon called the “hypocritical anti-Israel impunity at the UN.” Earlier this month Ms. Albanese presented a report — available on the UN’s website — called “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.”UN Watch characterizes the dispatch as “one giant libel, deliberately painting Israel — the world’s only Jewish state — as uniquely criminal.” Ms. Albanese’s work, the group contends, is “patently one-sided, ahistorical, and lacking any discussion of context.” Her report castigated Alphabet, Palantir, Amazon, and Microsoft for doing business in the Jewish state. Never mind that the Tel Aviv stock exchange hit record highs after the war with Iran.Even the Biden administration expressed occasional displeasure with Ms. Albanese — calling her “unfit for her role” and opining that “the United Nations should not tolerate antisemitism from a UN-affiliated official hired to promote human rights.” It demurred, though, from substantive action. The 46th president was too wedded to the broader multilateral system in which Ms. Albanese serves to act.Mr. Trump shows no such deference. He has in his second term, as he did in his first, issued an executive order cutting off funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The group proved to be a front for Hamas. Mr. Biden restored hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to Palestinian Arabs that Mr. Trump cut in his first term. America’s next envoy to the world body is set to be Congressman Mike Waltz.Ms. Albanese is liable to view her sanctioning as further evidence that America is, as she describes it, “subjugated by the Jewish lobby” and in thrall to “Israel’s greed.” To an antisemitic hammer, everything looks like a Jewish nail. Still, an administration that suffers neither illusions nor fools at the United Nations is one likelier to guard what Mr. Rubio calls “our sovereignty and that of our allies.”

A Biased UN Rapporteur Gets Called Out by the Trump Administration

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