Georgetown Cuts Ties With a UN Official Widely Accused of Antisemitism

Georgetown University’s disassociation with the United Nations’ Francesca Albanese is raising questions, in the first place, about the reason that a person widely accused of antisemitism had been engaged by a university named after America’s leading founder. Has Georgetown become too closely associated with Qatar’s world-wide influence operation? It has a branch at Doha that could be portrayed as part of an effort to instill American values in the Arab world. Is it Qatar, though, that is influencing minds in America instead?“There are reports showing that Georgetown has received $1 billion from Qatar in the past 20 years,” the executive director at UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, who has been advocating for the university to remove Ms. Albanese, tells the Sun. “There are some serious problems at Georgetown. She never should have been there in the first place.”Ms. Albanese’s name was recently removed from a list of the university’s affiliated scholars, UN Watch reports this week. The UN Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who has been accused by America and other countries of antisemitism, blames the move on the Department of State’s decision in July to impose sanctions and ban her entry to America. “I used to live in the U.S.,” she says. “I had an affiliation with a U.S. university. I used to lecture there, everything has been cut down.” In a separate statement she said, “The international community is made of 193 states, and this is the time to give the United States what it has been looking for: Isolation.”Appearing at the Doha Forum in December alongside other Israel critics, such as broadcaster Tucker Carlson, Ms. Albanense condemned what she called “mafia style” American and Israeli tactics against her. In an official statement, Doha echoed what it calls “attacks and pressures she has been subjected to.”This week the Israeli Mossad issued a rare public statement saying that Doha “encourages hatred, antisemitism and terror,” and is responsible for “spreading false narratives and incitement against the State of Israel worldwide across multiple platforms.”Qatar’s influence efforts are increasing beyond the press, the UN, and America. Israel itself is embroiled this week in a scandal involving members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s inner circles who allegedly were paid by Doha last year to skew public opinion against Egypt and for Qatar.Several prominent Americans are on Qatar’s payroll too. “Former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett just registered as a foreign agent for Qatar,” an MIT-enrolled student, Eyal Yakobi, writes on X, where he attached Mr. Bennett’s Foreign Agent Registration Act form. “He’s being paid $30K/month to convince Americans that Qatari universities don’t support Islamist extremism.” The Trump administration’s decisions like sanctioning Ms. Albanese, though, might prove most effective in uprooting Qatari and UN “extremism.” Ms. Albanese has “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West,” Secretary Marco Rubio wrote in July.Ms. Albanese, adds Mr. Neuer, is “the first UN Human Rights rapporteur in history to have been condemned for Holocaust inversion by France, Germany, Canada.” Rapporteurs are named by the UN human rights council to observe certain parts of the globe, and are listed as independent from other UN bodies.Secretary General Antonio Guterres and his spokesmen have long used that designation to avoid criticizing Ms. Albanese. Mr. Neuer notes, though, that Mr. Guterres’s predecessor, Ban ki-Moon, went to the rights council at Geneva to condemn Ms. Albanese’s predecessor, Richard Falk. Ms. Albanese has gone far beyond criticizing Israeli policies. Her activism, according to the State Department, includes sending threatening letters to international companies, including American ones, that do business in Israel and urging the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants against Israeli officials.The UN Reporteur often presents herself as a “human rights lawyer,” although she never passed the Italian bar. A frequent critic of her native country’s Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, Ms. Albanese has been widely criticized in Italy over her political statements. She said recently that the “real” Gaza death toll is 680,000, while even Hamas is claiming that some 70,000 people were killed in the war. Israel’s conduct in a war that Hamas launched on October 7, 2023, she claims “is not the first genocide that happens in plain sight. The Holocaust happened in plain sight.”

Georgetown Cuts Ties With a UN Official Widely Accused of Antisemitism

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