UN Rapporteur Albanese Walks Back Claim Antisemitism Refers to All People of the Middle East

The U.N. Special Rapporteur for human rights of Palestinians, Francesca Albanese, has backtracked on comments made in a recent interview in which she claimed “antisemitism” refers to all people from the Middle East, not just Jews. “‘Antisemitism’ was coined to refer to anyone who wasn’t European and came from the Middle East. The Jews were Semites, they were a semitic people, according to the Nazis and the fascists of Europe in the last century,” Ms. Albanese, one of Israel’s biggest critics said in a broadcast produced by an international trade union organization for Latin America, Clate Visión. In that same interview, the rapporteur also claimed that the use of the word “Musselmann” in the concentration camps was a reference to Muslims. In neither case is she correct. “Antisemitism” is a term coined in 1879 by a German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, who specifically used it to agitate against Jews, whom Mr. Marr warned were gaining dominance over Germans. Nazi leader Adolph Hitler built on that fear, according to a scholar on Nazi Germany, Thomas Weber, who said that Hitler not only considered Jews to be “leeches” to the nations but whose sole rassenbestimmung — loosely defined as the characteristics and purpose of a race — was to destroy everything for their own benefit. “His anti-Jewish racism was totally different from any other kind of racism,” Mr. Weber, a chair of history and international affairs at the University of Aberdeen in England and visiting scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told The New York Sun. Even though Hitler viewed other races as inferior — and didn’t view Muslims as a race at all, “Hitler thought that it was a civilizational task for both Germans and Europeans to rid the world of Jews so in that sense Jews were a totally different kind of danger to the world from say Africans or Slavs or Asians,” Mr. Weber added. “Albanese is just totally wrong.”As it relates to Jews and the Holocaust, Ms. Albanese also missed the mark by referring to “Musselmann” as a reference to Muslims. While the word is possibly an adaptation of Turkish used in German, Yiddish, and other languages, its use in concentration camps referred to the resignation and indifference of prisoners in the death throes of starvation and exhaustion, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion. “The term developed among the concentration camp inmates, not the Nazis, to describe prisoners, Jews and non-Jews, who were near death and appeared as walking skeletons,” writes the Holocaust remembrance center, Yad Vashem. According to Holocaust survivor and acclaimed psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, in his memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” “Musselmann” was first adopted to describe the barbarism of Nazi guards who enlisted kapos, prisoners assigned to supervise forced labor. Frankl and other scholars add that it was later adapted by the prisoners themselves to describe those who lost the will to live. Variations on the term also spread to other camps.“By misusing this term as evidence of a racial category, Albanese fundamentally distorts its historical meaning,” Yad Vashem wrote in an X post, adding that Ms. Albanese’s misuse and misdefining of both terms “ventures into obvious and dangerous historical revisionism.”After getting schooled, the rapporteur apologized for her butchering of the etymology and meaning of the words. “I sincerely apologize. I misread the term “Muselmann” (Muslim) used in Nazi camps for prisoners at the brink of death, wrongly inferring that the term antisemitism originally meant hatred of all Semitic peoples. In fact it was coined specifically to denote hatred of Jews,” Ms. Albanese said in a rare statement of reflection.This is not the first time Ms. Albanese has claimed that antisemitism is directed at “Semitic” people in general, not Jews in particular. In June, she was interviewed by New Zealand-based television host Katherine Ryan about her latest book, “When the World Sleeps.” In the discussion, she claims that because she’s from Italy, which allied with the Third Reich, that she’s an expert on the Holocaust. “I do know very well what is antisemitism. First of all, it’s broader than hate against Jews. It’s hate and discriminations against Semite people, including Arab people. Antisemitism is very real against Jewish people and against Arab people.”Mr. Weber opined that Ms. Albanese’s lack of knowledge surrounding the specifics of the Holocaust not only is a disservice to the Palestinian cause, but also is fanning the flames for a terrorist group, Hamas, which had been losing its standing in Gaza and on the Arab street prior to the October 7, 2023, attacks.“Ask yourself, do you really want Albanese to be your champion or could there be better champions for you?” Mr. Weber asked. “She would have been on the wrong side of history had Hamas not elicited the response that it did by its actions.”Mr. Weber added that her ignorance makes her unfit for the position she holds. “In a way I’m shocked how ignorant she is. I mean she really is not fit to hold the post she does if she does not know the basics of the Holocaust, the basics of Nazi ideology.”

UN Rapporteur Albanese Walks Back Claim Antisemitism Refers to All People of the Middle East

UN Rapporteur Albanese Walks Back Claim Antisemitism Refers to All People of the Middle East

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