When it comes to the fight against anti-Semitism, Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on all that much. Partisanship tends to make people more protective of those on their side of the aisle.
So when the two parties come to the same conclusion, it’s at least worth considering. And one such rare point of agreement? The fact that Francesca Albanese, the UN envoy for the Palestinian territories, is a raging anti-Semite.
Even her boss, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, once told U.S. anti-Semitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt that Albanese is indeed a “horrible person.”
Congratulations, then, to Francesca Albanese, whose horribleness is a rare point of consensus in global politics.
Albanese is again in the news because the Trump administration has sanctioned her for aiding the International Criminal Court’s unlawful attempt to prosecute and persecute Americans and Israelis, despite that agency’s undeniable lack of jurisdiction. And it’s not exactly an “only Republicans would do this” sort of action to take. To wit: Joe Biden’s ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, called Albanese “unfit for her role” due to her anti-Semitism, a point echoed by Biden State Department spokesman Matthew Miller in March 2024.
In his announcement of the sanctions last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West…. She has recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”
Well said. Albanese has declared war on the democratic West on behalf of the world’s most repressive and violent regimes, and she has a particular obsession with whipping up anti-Semitism all over the world. Albanese is a truly abominable figure in global politics.
She is also, like most delusional anti-Semites, whiny and self-pitying in the extreme. “I have been tormented for years,” she posted over the weekend, each desperate utterance merely proving that she is every bit the malign martyr-poseur she is accused of being.
For those interested in a rundown of Albanese’s greatest Jew-baiting hits, I wrote about her sordid career in January. But at the moment what strikes me about the Trump administration’s decision to sanction Albanese is what it reveals about her enabling institutions. After all, if sanctions are going to prevent her from working with certain organizations or people, it helps to know who was aiding her crusade along the way.
And you will probably not be shocked to see that among those institutions are Columbia and Harvard University. UN Watch obtained disclosure forms from 2023 and 2024 showing the schools made “in kind” contributions to Albanese’s efforts to buff Hamas’s reputation even after Oct. 7, 2023. These contributions came in the form of four research assistants in 2023 and “two rounds of interns/research assistants” in 2024 from Columbia alone.
That might not sound like much but it is a good indication of how elite universities became part of a nexus of “Globalize the Intifada” activism. As Albanese intensified her anti-Zionist campaign in the wake of those massacres, American institutions of higher learning were there to help her. It is one of the many ways these universities contributed to a dangerous atmosphere for Jews all over the world.
Albanese happened to have visited Columbia for a speech about a year after the Hamas attacks. Here is how a news report on her lecture opened:
“Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, shrugged when Columbia University student Eden Yadegar asked her if all Israelis were legitimate targets.
“When another student asked Albanese if she condemns the rape and kidnapping that occurred during the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack, the majority of the audience laughed, Yadegar told the Times of Israel.”
The anti-Semitic rot always runs deeper than it looks—even when it looks alarmingly deep to begin with.
