The Italian lawyer Francesca Albanese has been “Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” since 2022. She is not satisfied with preparing the annual report that is due for the UN Human Rights Council. She loves public appearances. The position has existed since 1993, created by the UN Commission on Human Rights, the forerunner of today's Human Rights Council. But none of her seven predecessors have made as much noise and noise as Albanese in the office.
She sees herself as an activist for the Palestinian cause and not as a neutral UN employee with a temporary reporting contract. Because of her stance, castigated by Jerusalem and Washington as anti-Semitic and anti-American, the Albanese living in Tunis is not allowed to enter Israel and the USA.
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In an interview (conducted in Italian) with the Confederation of Public Service Employees of Latin America and the Caribbean (CLATE) in mid-September, Albanese gave a kind of history lesson about the emergence of anti-Semitism in Europe and the extermination of Jews in German concentration camps. According to Albanese, anti-Semitism has historically had little to do with hatred of Jews. Rather, its origin was the “racist hatred of the non-white, the non-pure, the non-Christian.” Anti-Semitism is the hatred of all “Semitic peoples” from the Orient, including Jews and Muslims alike, Albanese continued. The Jews were later particularly targeted by the initially general racial hatred of the Europeans towards the peoples of the Orient because at that time there were simply more Jews than Muslims on the Old Continent.
Historical revisionism and crude definitions
As evidence for this thesis, Albanese states in the conversation that, according to contemporary witness reports from the German concentration camps, the Jews on the way to the gas chambers were referred to as “musulmani”, i.e. Muslims. To put it somewhat exaggeratedly, Albanese's thesis is that anti-Semitism specific to Jews was a shorthanded misunderstanding and that the Nazis "meant" Muslims when they exterminated the Jews.
The Jerusalem Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem accused Albanese of historical revisionism. Both her statements about the origins of anti-Semitism and her interpretation of the term “Muselmann” in the camps are “historically inaccurate”. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) now gave Albanese a history lesson: When the “Anti-Semite League” was founded in the German Empire by the Magdeburg journalist Wilhelm Marr (1819 to 1904) in 1879 and thus introduced the term anti-Semitism, this was a direct outgrowth of religiously based hatred of Jews. The attribute “Semitic,” on the other hand, refers at most to a language family that includes Hebrew and Arabic, but not to ethnic groups or peoples.
The term “Muselmänn”, whose etymological origin has not been clarified, was used in camp jargon to describe those prisoners who were so emaciated and weak that they were doomed to die and were usually sent straight to the gas, according to the IHRA. It referred to prisoners in their final physical and mental state, but had no racial ideological meaning. The Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi (1919 to 1987) explained that in camp jargon, a “Muselmann” was a description for “the irreversibly exhausted, emaciated prisoner who was close to death.” The term described the condition of a prisoner; it did not mean that the Nazis viewed Jews as Muslims or sent them to the gas chambers under this identity.
In the face of the storm of indignation, Albanese made sense on Monday, simply saying on her social media channels: "I sincerely apologize. I misinterpreted the term 'Muselmann', which was used in Nazi camps for doomed prisoners. And I incorrectly assumed that the term 'anti-Semitism' originally referred to hatred against all Semitic peoples. In reality, it was coined specifically to express hatred against Jews."
