Francesca Albanese, the Italian law graduate who has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories since 2022, has found a new way to strip the Jews of their own history. In an interview that surfaced Sunday, Albanese claimed that Jews being led to the gas chambers in Nazi death camps were known as Muslims. She made the claim to support a broader argument: that antisemitism never meant hatred of Jews specifically, and that its true victims include the peoples of the Middle East.
Albanese made the remarks in an interview earlier this month with the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of State Workers. Discussing the history of antisemitism, she claimed that some accounts of life in the concentration camps describe how Jews on their way to the gas chambers “were called ‘the Muslims.'”
The claim rests on a real word with a completely different meaning. At Auschwitz and other Nazi camps, prisoners used the German word Muselmann, literally “Muslim,” for inmates so emaciated by starvation, disease, and exhaustion that they were approaching death. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial says the term applied to prisoners in that physical condition regardless of religion or ethnicity, and that its origin remains uncertain. Prisoners labeled Muselmänner often died soon afterward or were selected for execution. The term was never a Nazi racial classification identifying Jews as Muslims.
The word described what the camps did to a human body. It said nothing about who the Nazis believed their victims were. On that question the Nazis left no ambiguity. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that the Nazis treated Jews as a distinct prisoner category. At Auschwitz, many Jews deemed unable to work were sent directly from the arrival platform to the gas chambers and never registered as prisoners at all. Those Jews never lived long enough in the camp to be called anything.
Albanese used the distorted camp history to prop up a distorted definition. “Anti-Semitism, as I often say, exists; it’s a scourge; it’s discrimination—not just against Jews, but against Semitic peoples,” she said. “When the term ‘anti-Semitism’ was first coined, it referred to anyone who wasn’t European and came from the Middle East.” She claimed that because Jews were the largest such group in Europe, the term only later came to mean hatred of Jews, and described “a racist hatred toward non-whites, the ‘impure,’ and non-Christians, which eventually crystallized into antisemitism as hatred toward Jews.” The historical record says otherwise. According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the term was coined in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr to designate anti-Jewish campaigns, and it has referred to prejudice against Jews alone since its inception. Marr, who founded the League of Antisemites that same year, chose the word to give Jew-hatred a scientific-sounding name. “Semitic” describes a family of languages that includes Hebrew and Arabic. No one in Marr’s movement was campaigning against Arabic speakers.
Albanese stops short of claiming the gas chambers never existed. She has found a method that serves the same purpose. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, whose working definition of antisemitism has been adopted by the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, and Albanese’s own Italy, recognizes Holocaust distortion as the close relative of outright denial: efforts to excuse, minimize, or misrepresent the Holocaust and its principal elements. The central element of the Holocaust is the identity of its victims. The Nazis built the camps to murder Jews, and they murdered six million of them for that reason alone. Albanese has taken the Jews marched into the gas chambers and assigned them a Muslim identity, and taken the word coined to name hatred of Jews and assigned it to the peoples of the Middle East. The deniers of the last century tried to erase the crime. Albanese erases the victims and leaves the crime standing without them. The same IHRA definition lists drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis as an example of antisemitism, and Albanese has done so repeatedly, comparing Israel to the Third Reich, its prime minister to Hitler, Gaza to a concentration camp, and Israelis to the Nazi officials who defended the murder of children at Nuremberg. By the standard her own government has adopted, her record is antisemitic.
Albanese acknowledged that “hatred toward Jews simply because they are Jews does exist, it is extremely serious and must not be confused with criticism of the State of Israel.” She then revealed where her argument was headed. “Today, the issue of anti-Semitism is being used and exploited to silence the debate regarding Israel’s crimes, because Israel presents itself as a Jewish state, setting itself up as the defender and representative of all Jews,” she said.
Albanese has applied the same logic to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. In 2024, after French President Emmanuel Macron called the Hamas attack of October 7 the largest antisemitic massacre of the century, Albanese answered him on X, insisting that the victims “were not killed because of their Judaism” and claiming the attack came in response to Israeli oppression. At Auschwitz, she renames the Jewish victims as Muslims. In the kibbutzim of the Gaza border, she renames their murder as a political response. In both cases, the Jews disappear from their own deaths. Earlier this year, speaking at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha, she called Israel the common enemy of humanity, drawing a rebuke from Shannon Seban, Director of European Affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement, who said such collective demonization echoes some of the darkest chapters in modern history.
UN Watch, the Geneva-based watchdog that first published the clip, posted it under the heading “Holocaust Distortion from U.N. ‘Expert.'” The organization wrote, “Even in Nazi death camps: She cannot name Jew-hatred without replacing the Jews.”
Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, dismantled the remarks point by point on X. “Francesca Albanese in this interview is not explaining antisemitism; she is completely rewriting its meaning, and in the process distorting the history of the Holocaust,” Neuer wrote. “Her remarks reveal astonishing ignorance, and malice.”
Neuer noted that when Marr introduced the term in 1879, he meant hostility to Jews, expressed in the racial language of his time. “‘Semitic’ denotes a family of languages,” Neuer wrote. “It does not make antisemitism a general category of prejudice that can be reassigned to other peoples.” The Nazis, he added, targeted Jews as Jews, and never began with a broad campaign against outsiders that later happened to settle on the Jews. “Her account takes a campaign of extermination directed at Jews and makes its victims sound interchangeable,” he wrote.
Neuer called the claim about Jews being called Muslims “especially grotesque.” He cited Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist who survived Auschwitz and became one of the Holocaust’s most important witnesses, who explained that Muselmann was camp slang for “the irreversibly exhausted, worn-out prisoner, close to death.” Neuer wrote, “It described a prisoner’s condition. It did not mean the Nazis regarded Jews as Muslims, or sent them to the gas chambers under that identity.”
He then pointed to the historical record that demolishes her theory. Hitler welcomed and collaborated with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. The two met in Berlin in 1941, and the Nazi regime financed the Mufti’s antisemitic broadcasts to Muslim audiences. The SS enlisted the Mufti to help recruit Bosnian Muslims into its Handschar division, and addressing the division’s imams, the Mufti called Nazi Germany their ally and identified “World Jewry” as a common enemy. “That is the historical record Albanese’s theory cannot accommodate,” Neuer wrote. “Nazi leaders recruited Muslims to their cause while pursuing the extermination of Jews.”
Neuer exposed the purpose behind the rewrite. “Albanese first stretches antisemitism until it ceases to identify hatred of Jews, then claims that invoking it is a device to ‘silence debate,'” he wrote. “Her argument depends on stripping the word of its meaning before dismissing those who use it.”
He reminded readers that Albanese wrote in a 2014 open letter to her family priest that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” Only when confronted did she call her words “infelicitous, analytically inaccurate and unintendedly offensive.” Neuer wrote, “Yet now she offers a definition under which antisemitism is no longer specifically hatred of Jews. How convenient.”
UN Watch is calling on all UN member states to denounce Albanese, singling out members of the Human Rights Council including France, the Netherlands, Italy, Czechia, Estonia, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. “The Council must not allow someone speaking under its authority to erase the identity of the Jews murdered by the Nazis,” Neuer wrote.
The Muselmann claim is the latest entry in a long record of Holocaust comparisons. On September 19, days before the interview surfaced, Albanese responded to an Israeli model who said on i24NEWS that a child in Gaza could grow up to become a terrorist. Albanese wrote on X: “(Children will grow up.) This was also the argument made by Nazi officials during the Nuremberg trials to justify why they killed children during the Holocaust.”
In October 2024, she compared Israel’s war against Hamas to the Third Reich and its genocide of people who did not fit the “pure race.” The World Jewish Congress condemned the post as Holocaust inversion that weaponizes the tragedy of the Jewish people to demonize Israel. France’s representative to the UN called for her immediate dismissal and an investigation, saying that by comparing Israel’s defensive operations after the October 7 pogroms to the Third Reich and the Holocaust, she had “crossed a new red line.”
In August 2024, she called Gaza “the largest and most shameful concentration camp of the 21st century.” In July 2024, she endorsed an image posted by former UN official Craig Mokhiber showing Hitler in a crowd above a photo of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, replying, “This is precisely what I was thinking today.” In December 2023, she addressed “Fellow Europeans, Italians, Germans,” invoking the Holocaust to warn that Israel’s war in Gaza showed the darkest page of Europe’s recent history had taught it nothing. As early as 2021, she equated the Palestinian Nakba with the Holocaust, telling an audience that just as the Shoah was an unspeakable tragedy for the Jewish people, the Nakba was one for the Palestinians.
Her treatment of the October 7 massacre follows the same pattern. On the day of the attack, she posted that the violence must be put in context. She later cast doubt on a UN report that found evidence of Hamas sexual violence on October 7, and she questioned whether six Israeli hostages shot in the head by Hamas in a Rafah tunnel were “executed or killed,” lending support to a false rumor that the IDF had killed them. In October 2025 she reposted the statement that Israel is “the incarnation of evil.” In a May 2026 Facebook post, she mocked the Jewish concept of the Chosen People, asking whether Jews were “Chosen to dominate?”
Her relationship with facts extends to her own résumé. For years, Albanese described herself as an “international lawyer,” including in her application for the UN post, which she certified as true. In 2025 she admitted to Vanity Fair Italia that she never took the bar exam and is not a lawyer. Neuer, who exposed the discrepancy, called it “one more example of her utter disregard for facts and accountability.”
In July 2025, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Albanese over her efforts to push the International Criminal Court to act against American and Israeli officials, companies, and executives. Washington had previously asked UN Secretary-General António Guterres to dismiss her, accusing her of antisemitism.
This raises a question central to understanding Albanese’s claim. Why does the Bible insist on naming the Jewish people explicitly as the target of their enemies’ hatred?
The Bible never lets Jew-hatred hide behind a general category. When Haman plotted genocide in Persia, the Book of Esther recorded his target with precision. Haman was not content to kill Mordecai alone; he “sought to destroy all the Jews that were throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus, even the people of Mordecai” (Esther 3:6). His royal decree ordered the destruction of “all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day” (Esther 3:13). Persia was full of peoples speaking Semitic languages. Haman’s decree named one people.
The Book of Esther is also where the word Yehudi (Jew) first appears as the identity of a single person. Mordecai is introduced as ish Yehudi, “a certain Jew” (Esther 2:5). The Bible introduces the Jew by name at the very moment an enemy arises to destroy him by name.
The Sages understood this hatred as a permanent feature of history, directed at a specific people. Rashi, commenting on Esau’s reunion with Jacob, cites the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: Halakha hi, b’yadua she’Esav sonei l’Yaakov, “It is an established rule, well known, that Esau hates Jacob” (Rashi on Genesis 33:4). The hatred is aimed at Jacob, the father of the Jewish people.
The Psalmist described the final goal of that hatred, and it matches what Albanese is doing with words:
“They have said: ‘Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.'” (Psalm 83:5, numbered 83:4 in Christian Bibles)
The enemies of Israel seek to kill the Jews and also to erase the name. Physical destruction and the destruction of memory are two halves of one campaign. Albanese has taken the one word invented specifically to describe hatred of Jews and emptied it of Jews. She has taken the Jews murdered at Auschwitz and renamed them after a different people. She has taken the Nazis’ own words from Nuremberg and pinned them on the Jewish state. Six million Jews were murdered because they were Jews, and a UN official now tells audiences they died as “Muslims.”
Haman’s decree survives in the Book of Esther with its target written in plain language, and Jews read it aloud every Purim so that no one can ever rename the victims. The Nazis kept meticulous records, and every one of them identifies the Jews as Jews. The Psalmist warned that Israel’s enemies would try to make the name of Israel forgotten. Albanese holds a UN mandate, a microphone, and a sanctions designation from the United States. The name she is trying to erase has outlasted Pharaoh, Haman, and Hitler, and it will outlast her.
