A U.S. appeals court reinstated sanctions against Francesca Albanese on May 22, reversing a lower court ruling that had briefly removed her from the Treasury Department’s list of sanctioned foreign nationals. For roughly 48 hours, Albanese had celebrated what she called a legal victory on X. Then the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stepped in. The Trump administration can now “implement and enforce Albanese’s designation as a designated foreign national” while the full appeal proceeds. She is, once again, a sanctioned UN official, the only one in memory, continuing to collect a UN paycheck while under active U.S. government sanctions.
When a UN official with this record posts on Facebook, urging Germans to stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust, the United Nations has now become an instrument of Jew-hatred and Holocaust denial.
In a Facebook post that has drawn international attention, Albanese argued that Germany’s support for Israel is not genuine remorse for the Holocaust but a “historical superiority syndrome,” a “convenient mask” worn to gain readmission to the Western world after World War II. She wrote that the West admitted Jews back into the fold only because Jews had learned to become “superior;” no longer a “fragile minority,” no longer “the people of the book,” but “the chosen people.” She followed this with a barely concealed question: “chosen to rule?” She went further, accusing Germany of respecting only Zionist Jews, calling the German state “socially deranged,” and closing her post with what reads as a call to action: “I know Germans can do better. I have seen them. But they are called upon emancipating themselves. This is their chance.”
The framing is a textbook antisemitic inversion: Jewish survival after the Holocaust is recast as arrogance; Jewish chosenness, referred to as am segulah, the treasured nation, is transformed into a hunger for domination. Whoever works to delegitimize the Jewish state works to delegitimize the Jewish right to exist. That is what Albanese does, week after week, with a UN title attached to her name.
This latest post is simply her most recent offense. At an Al Jazeera forum in Doha earlier this year, she declared Israel “the common enemy of humanity,” a statement that drew formal condemnations from Austria, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and France, several of whom demanded her immediate resignation. At the same forum, she accused Western nations of complicity in what she called a “genocide” and made remarks widely understood as invoking the antisemitic conspiracy that Jews control global finance and technology. She has referred to a “Jewish lobby” controlling the United States and Europe, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and said that Hamas’s October 7 terrorist atrocities, which include rape, murder, the kidnapping of babies and elderly, need to be “put in context.” In February 2024, she wrote to French President Macron that the victims of October 7 were not killed because of their Jewishness, but “as a reaction to Israel’s oppression.” In August 2024, she likened Israel’s war against Hamas to the Holocaust, calling Gaza a “concentration camp of the 21st century.” In July of that year, she reposted an image comparing Prime Minister Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler with the comment: “This is precisely what I was thinking today.” Most recently, on May 16, she endorsed a New York Times story falsely claiming Israel trained police dogs to sexually assault prisoners, calling it “accurate but barely scratching the surface.” She has also accused the United States of being “subjugated by the Jewish lobby” and claimed that Zionists fabricated antisemitic incidents on American soil.
The UN has not fired her. Her mandate was renewed in 2024 and extends until 2028. Last year, the UN launched a probe into Albanese for allegedly accepting travel funded by pro-Hamas organizations. That probe has produced no consequences.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on Albanese in July 2025 “for her illegitimate and shameful efforts” to encourage the International Criminal Court to investigate U.S. and Israeli officials, neither country being a signatory to the Rome Statute that created the ICC, making the effort, in Rubio’s words, “a gross infringement on the sovereignty of both countries.” Albanese had sent threatening letters to dozens of American companies urging the ICC to pursue investigations and prosecutions of their executives. “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty,” Rubio said. “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism and open contempt for the United States, Israel and the West.” As recently as May 18, Albanese posted on X: “For 4 yrs I have urged the ICC to investigate and prosecute Israeli officials for int’l crimes in Palestine.” She is not hiding what she does. She is proud of it.
When U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon issued a preliminary ruling blocking the sanctions, finding they violated Albanese’s free speech rights in a case brought by her husband and daughter, Albanese posted on X: “US court has suspended the US sanctions against me!” The New York Times declared she had “won a significant legal skirmish.” Four days later, the appeals court reversed the ruling. UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer posted directly to Albanese on X: “I tried to explain to you that the injunction was only temporary and was likely to be frozen and overturned by the appeals court, but as a non-lawyer who falsely claims to be a lawyer, you were either unwilling or unable to understand.”
Neuer’s reference to Albanese as a “non-lawyer” is not a rhetorical jab, it is a documented fact. Albanese has long identified herself as an international lawyer. In a May 2025 Vanity Fair interview, she finally admitted she never took the bar exam, “because I’m not a lawyer, and I never wanted to do it.” Despite UN Watch demanding since June 2025 that her official UN biography be corrected, the page still describes her as “an international lawyer, specialized in human rights and the Middle East.” The institution that cannot be bothered to correct a fraudulent credential on its own website is also the institution that has protected her, renewed her mandate, and done nothing while she urged foreign courts to prosecute the officials of two sovereign democracies.
What Albanese does is not commentary or advocacy. It is a systematic campaign, conducted under UN cover, to strip the Jewish people of the moral standing to survive, to defend themselves, and to call what happened to them what it was. The institution, founded in direct response to the Holocaust, now employs a woman who tells Germans to stop feeling guilty about it. The Western nations that condemned her words and then voted to renew her mandate bear full responsibility for what she does with it next.
