Peace and Justice Post

Israel lobby groups have spread doctored quotes by UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights Francesca Albanese to defame her. Their desperate campaign is a testament to her work and the threat she poses by holding Israel accountable for genocide.

By Michael Lynk, Mondoweiss, February 24, 2026

Francesca Albanese in Bogotá, Colombia, July 2025 (Photo: Andrea Puentes – Joel González/ Presidencia de la República de Columbia)

Mark Twain and Winston Churchill are both purported to have once said that a lie can travel half-way around the world before truth has had a chance to put its pants on. 

On February 7, Francesca Albanese, the current UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, gave a short presentation by video conference to a media forum in Doha, Qatar, organized by the Al Jazeera network. She was part of a panel, which included Fatou Bensouda, the former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, speaking about the role of international law in addressing serious human rights violations. 

In her remarks, Albanese spoke sharply about the Israeli genocide in Gaza since October 2023. In particular, she pointed out that many Western states and corporations had not only armed Israel, but had provided it with economic and diplomatic support throughout the genocide. She also criticized much of the Western media for amplifying the rhetoric of Israel’s pro-apartheid and genocidal narrative. In her presentation, Albanese went on to say that:

“…if international law has been stabbed in the heart, it is also true that never before has the global community seen the challenges that we all face. We, who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms, and weapons, we now see that we, as a humanity, have a common enemy. And freedoms, the respect for fundamental freedoms, is the last peaceful avenue, the last peaceful toolbox that we have to regain our freedom.”

What happened next created a firestorm, based entirely on slander and deception for something she never said.

Albanese’s warning that humanity is facing a common enemy was clearly directed at the international system of finance capital, large tech corporations, and weapons manufacturers that had enabled the genocide in Gaza. She contrasted that system with the rights-based principles of international law, which are designed to protect and enhance our personal and collective freedoms. 

The following day, a doctored version of Albanese’s presentation was posted on the YouTube site of UN Watch, a notorious private organization headquartered in Geneva whose raison d’être is to attack the United Nations’ scrutiny of the many human rights violations committed through Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory. The truncated version by UN Watch had Albanese saying: “Instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed, given it political excuses, political sheltering, economic and financial support.” And then the video cuts to: “we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy.” The clear implication in the edited video was that Albanese had called Israel “the common enemy of humanity”. 

This doctored UN Watch video spread like wildfire through the official politico-system of the Global North. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot called for Albanese’s immediate resignation for her “outrageous and reprehensible remarks which target not the Israeli government, whose policies can be criticized, but Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable.” 

The German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul piled on, stating that: “Ms. Albanese has already made numerous missteps in the past. I condemn her recent statements on Israel. She cannot hold her position.” Antonio Tajani, the Italian Foreign Minister, said that her “behavior, statements and initiatives aren’t appropriate for the position she holds.” Similar calls were issued by the foreign ministers of Czechia and Austria. 

Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, offered no defence for Albanese, even after the revelation that her alleged comments on Israel had been doctored. During a press conference at the UN headquarters in New York on February 12, Stéphane Dujarric, the official spokesperson for the Secretary General, was asked about the call by the French Foreign Minister for Albanese’s resignation. Dujarric replied laconically that: “We don’t agree with much of what she says.” 

After this initial wave of denunciations, international civil society began to fight back. Albanese, who had been voted by PassBlue as one of the United Nations’ Persons of the Year for 2024, referred to the full transcript of her presentation, and remarked: “I have never, ever, ever said ‘Israel is the common enemy of humanity.’” She pointed to the ongoing campaign of attacks on her by pro-Israeli organizations following the release of her comprehensive recent report to the United Nations on the genocide in Gaza and, in a separate report, the naming of large corporations (including Microsoft and Amazon) as potentially complicit in aiding Israel’s atrocities. 

On February 13, Agnes Callamard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, issued a public statement condemning the five European foreign ministers who had called for Albanese’s head based on “a deliberately truncated video to misrepresent and gravely misconstrue her messages.” Callamard then contrasted the vehemence of these ministers’ attacks on Albanese with their sotto voce approach to the Israeli genocide in Gaza:

“If only these minsters had been as loud and forceful in confronting a state committing genocide, unlawful occupation and apartheid as they have in attacking a UN expert. Their cowardice and refusal to hold Israel accountable stand in stark contrast to the Special Rapporteur’s unwavering commitment to speaking truth to power.”

Strong statements of support for Albanese have also been issued by Artists for Palestine (whose 100+ signatories included the actors Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem, the filmmaker Spike Lee, the British pop singer Annie Lennox, the Nobel Prize Laurate for Literature Annie Ernaux and the critic Judith Butler) and through an open letter signed by 150 former European ambassadors and diplomats and former United Nations officials. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights also defended Albanese, stating that it was very worried about the rise in personal attacks, threats, and misinformation directed towards UN officials and independent human rights experts. 

United Nations special rapporteurs are unpaid human rights experts appointed by the Human Rights Council for six-year mandates to publicly report on human rights violations and trends worldwide. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called this system of human rights experts, known as special procedures, the “crown jewel” of the UN human rights system. The Special Rapporteur position for human rights in occupied Palestinian territory is, arguably, the most challenging of the approximately 60 UN human rights expert mandates, given the intense attacks that the rapporteurs have recently faced from Israel, the United States, and a suite of pro-Israel organizations such as UN Watch and NGO Monitor. 

UN Watch, in particular, acts as a ventriloquist for Israel’s justification of its illegal occupation and its genocide in Gaza. While presenting itself as a non-governmental human rights organization with official status at the UN, UN Watch’s primary task is to ardently defend Israel, invariably in incendiary language, through a neo-conservative and Likudnik perspective. It has consistently refused to reveal who its funders are, although independent reporting has named the American Jewish Committee and the Newton and Rochelle Becker Foundation as major sources. UN Watch’s many targets — including the most recent UN special rapporteurs on Palestine, the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Palestine and Israel, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNRWA, and countries that are critical of Israel — are frequently labelled as antisemitic individuals and organizations or, slightly more kindly, as being ferociously biased against Israel.

Albanese has also been fiercely attacked by Israel. In 2024, it declared her to be persona non grata, banning her from visiting the occupied Palestinian territory, in part because of her UN reports concluding that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. In 2025, Israel released a report — drawn largely from UN Watch — where it claimed that she was linked to terrorism (because she spoke at events organized by the Palestinian human rights organizations Al-Haq) and because she supposedly spread “antisemitic rhetoric. And last week, Israel issued an extraordinary tweet on X, claiming that she is a “mouthpiece for Hamas”. This latest smear was issued despite the many times that Albanese has condemned the Hamas’ attacks on October 7 2023 as serious violations of international law because Israel civilians were killed or taken hostage.

For Albanese’s courage in previously naming the Israeli genocide and warning American corporations that their weapons and hi-tech sales to Israel might expose them to criminal liability at the International Criminal Court, American Secretary of State Marco Rubio formally sanctioned her in July 2025. He claimed that: “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.” 

The American sanctions against a UN human rights expert are unprecedented. They essentially freeze Albanese out of the international banking system. The sanctions have also impounded the condo that she and her husband own in Washington, prevented her from receiving reimbursement for her medical expenses from American insurance companies, and prohibited her from traveling to the United Nations headquarters in New York to deliver her annual reports. Many of her fellow UN human rights experts have publicly condemned the sanctions, pointing out that they violate international law, including the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. The human rights experts added that: 

“The targeting of the Special Rapporteur cannot be separated from the egregious international crimes and human rights abuses being perpetrated against Palestinians and the longstanding efforts to delegitimise those who defend their rights.”

Stefan Steinberg. WSWS, 20 Feb 2026

This year’s Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) has witnessed a growing conflict between a layer of artists determined to speak out against the genocide that has taken place and continues until this day in Gaza, and the Berlin festival management, together with its backers in the German government, determined to keep genocide off the agenda.

An open letter released February 17, and now signed by more than 100 film artists, all of whom have attended previous Berlinales, accuses the film festival of “censoring artists who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the German state’s key role in enabling it.”

The signatories include Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Peter Mullan, Mike Leigh, Nan Goldin, Adam McKay, Alia Shawkat, Brian Cox, Hany Abu Assad, Joshua Oppenheimer, Ken Loach, Mahdi Fleifel, Mark Ruffalo, Saleh Bakri and Sarah Friedland.

The open letter raises a serious allegation made by the Palestine Film Institute to the effect that the festival has been “policing filmmakers alongside a continued commitment to collaborate with Federal Police on their investigations.”

The letter refers to those filmmakers who spoke out on behalf of Palestinians and their rights on the Berlinale stage at the 2025 festival being aggressively reprimanded by senior festival programmers. The letter cites one film worker who told Film Workers for Palestine​: “there was a feeling of paranoia in the air, of not being protected and of being persecuted, which I had never felt before at a film festival.”

The open letter also deplores the statement made at the opening of the festival that artists should “stay out of politics”: The artists write:

We fervently disagree with ​the statement made by Berlinale​ 2026 jury president Wim Wenders​ that filmmaking is “the opposite of politics”​. You cannot separate one from the other. We are deeply concerned that the German state-funded Berlinale is helping put into practice what Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion recently condemned as Germany’s misuse of draconian legislation “to restrict advocacy for Palestinian rights, chilling public participation and shrinking discourse in academia and the arts.”

​The letter quotes the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei who described what was happening in Germany as “doing what they did in the 1930s.”​

The public appeal points to the joint role of the US and German governments in supplying Israel with the weapons (including internationally forbidden US-made thermal and thermobaric weapons) it requires to continue its campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Noting that previous Berlinales had publicly condemned “atrocities ​carried out against​ people in Iran and Ukraine,” the letter concludes:

We call on the Berlinale to fulfil its moral duty and clearly state its opposition to Israel’s genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against Palestinians, and completely end its involvement in shielding Israel from criticism and calls for accountability.

In another significant development, Kaouther Ben Hania, director of the award-winning film The Voice of Hind Rajab, refused to accept the “Most Valuable Film” award handed out at the Cinema for Peace ceremony in Berlin this week after an Israeli general was recognized at the same gathering. Also in attendance at the “peace” gathering was the former US Secretary of State and war criminal Hillary Clinton.

While Cinema for Peace is not officially a part of the Berlinale, the gathering has been held since 2002 on a yearly basis to run parallel to the film festival and attract the same audience.

In refusing to take her award, Ben Hania said: “The Israeli army killed Hind Rajab; killed her family; killed the two paramedics who came to save her, with the complicity of the world’s most powerful governments and institutions.”

“I refuse to let their deaths become a backdrop for a polite speech about peace. Not while the structures that enabled them remain untouched,” she continued.

Ben Hania added that the death of the six-year-old Hind was “not an exception, it’s part of a genocide,” and she criticized those who described large-scale civilian killings as “self-defense” or “complex circumstances” while repressing all opposition.

“Peace requires justice and accountability, not glossy slogans,” she concluded.

In response to the artists’ open letter directed toward the Berlinale, its management and supporters in the German media have gone into overdrive to defend the festival’s stance.

Festival director Tricia Tuttle issued a statement, evasively declaring: “We are representing lots of people who have different views, including lots of people who live in Germany who want a more complex understanding of Israel’s positionality than maybe the rest of the world has right now.”

In one short paragraph, Tuttle repeats the phrase complex/complexity in relation to Israel three times—the very same words Kaouther Ben Hania criticised in her award rejection speech!

What is Tuttle talking about! There is no “complexity” when it comes to taking sides on the issue of genocide.

On the one side, are the broad masses of the world’s population who increasingly regard Israel as a pariah state responsible for one of the worst acts of genocidal violence since the Holocaust. This opposition, which has taken the form of numerous mass protests, demonstrations and strikes, also extends to those countries which are the closest allies of the state of Israel, the US, Germany, Great Britain and France. 

On the other side, are the governments listed above, together with bourgeois regimes and nominal opposition parties all over the world that continue to aid and maintain relations with the war criminals in Tel Aviv, thus making a continuation of the genocide possible.

In Germany, it should be noted, it was a Green Party Culture Minister Claudia Roth who in 2024 denounced a Berlinale jury team as antisemitic for awarding a prize to the film No Other Land, which documents the crimes of the Israeli army and government against the Palestinian population in the West Bank. More recently, a leading member of the Left Party, Andreas Büttner, raised false claims of antisemitism to close down an art exhibition held in Potsdam defending the rights of Palestinians.

The stirrings of opposition among film workers to the complicity of cultural institutions in supporting genocide is to be welcomed. At the same time, those engaged in the culture industry in Germany should take note. The comment made by a Palestine film worker cited in the open letter, “there was a feeling of paranoia in the air, of not being protected and of being persecuted, which I had never felt before at a film festival,” recalls a similar comment by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.

A year ago, Albanese was prevented from holding lectures in Germany on the situation in Gaza. Responding to the threats and intimidation she had faced in Germany, Albanese commented: “I have to admit that about 75 hours in this country have made me pretty nervous and I cannot wait to get back to ‘peaceful’ Tunisia [where she is a resident]. I have never felt this sense of lacking oxygen that I feel here.”

This process is not restricted to Germany. Across the globe, governments and a host of official institutions are using police-state methods, recalling actions taken by fascist governments in the 1930s, to arrest, intimidate, imprison without due process and violently repress opposition to the mass slaughter in Gaza. Genocide is being normalised by these forces in order to justify new wars and new atrocities directed at the broadest layers of the world population.