Earlier today, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese apologized for saying that the term “antisemitism” applies to Muslims as well as Jews. But the excuse she offered for her mistake only makes it more outrageous. She claimed that when she came across the word “Muselmann” in Holocaust testimonies, she thought it meant “Muslim.”
It was actually used to refer to starving, emaciated prisoners in the Nazi death camps, the vast majority of whom were Jews.
Her apology would be more convincing if she hadn’t been called out for making the exact same mistake mere months ago. In an interview in June, she said that antisemitism was “broader than hate against Jews,” saying it is “hate and discrimination against Semite people.”
The problem with both her mistake and her apology is that she still doesn’t recognize the whole history. The word “anti-Semitism” isn’t exclusive to Jews by coincidence. It was invented by German agitator Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to rebrand ancient hatred for Jews as socially acceptable racial “science.” The race science movement was in its infancy, just coming into fashion. Religious prejudice was becoming less acceptable. Jew haters needed a new formulation that would make their discrimination against Jews acceptable to the social mores of their era. So, they rebranded Jews as an “inferior race,” and hit upon the word “Semite,” to describe us. Until then, and since, the word “Semitic,” had referred to a group of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Amharic. It was never used to refer to a group of people.
The idea of Jews as an inferior race became core to the Nazis’ racial hierarchy, which placed Jews at its very bottom (though they also accused Jews of being a cabal of all-powerful elites). That is why the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, two-thirds of European Jewry. Contrary to Albanese’s claim in June that antisemitism targets “Arab people,” the Nazis collaborated with Arab leaders and hoped to bring the Final Solution to Arab lands. In Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, and Algeria, they opened brutal work camps where thousands of Jews died. Arabs and Europeans alike staffed these camps and enacted immense cruelty on Jewish prisoner-slaves.
In Iraq, Hitler’s ideas were broadcast over the radio. During a brief lapse in British control, a two-day pogrom unleashed brutal violence on Baghdad’s Jewish population. My grandmother Hela survived it. The event became known as the Farhud.
Not all Arabs participated actively in enacting Nazi policies. But many did. The Nazi incursion into Arab lands and the policies they enacted there against Jews did not prompt an organized resistance from Arab inhabitants. The Nazis were defeated in North Africa and the Middle East by the Allied forces.
What’s most unsettling about this whole affair isn’t just that Albanese tried to universalize the Jewish suffering of the Nazi Holocaust. It’s that even in apologizing, she doesn’t come to the conclusion that anyone who truly understands the history of the word “anti-Semitism” must reach: Anti-Jewish hate has changed through time. It mutates according to what is currently fashionable. Albanese has built a career on laundering pro-Hamas statements with the legitimacy of her role at the United Nations. If she wants to continue that way, she can’t possibly acknowledge that extreme anti-Israel sentiment is the primary way anti-Jewish hate manifests today.
Nowhere is the mutation of anti-Jewish hate into anti-Israel animus more clear than in statements about the Holocaust by anti-Israel figures. I had the opportunity to debate Norman Finkelstein, himself the son of Holocaust survivors, last week. I knew going in that Finkelstein denies survivor testimony of Hamas’s rapes and sexual crimes, but I was sick to my stomach when the professor started to scream at me about how there is “not one frame” of evidence. He went on to compare me to Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist.
Days after the debate went up, I noticed another interview he had done, with the Middle East Eye. In it, he compared the experience of Gazans to Jews in the Holocaust. Bizarrely, he brought up the fact that no one ever asks “how many of the Jews killed were combatants.” I called him out; it was an obvious gaffe. The Holocaust was a genocide against innocent Jews who had done nothing to “deserve” extermination. That is a known, historical fact. It can’t be projected into the future onto Gazans to excuse the crimes of Hamas militants who are, without a shadow of a doubt, militants.
Alonso Gurmendi, who’s a fellow at the London School of Economics, commented on a post I made about Finkelstein’s comment. His response was to characterize the most industrialized genocide in history as a “war Jews participated in,” and imply that Jews did something similar to the Hamas October 7th massacre.
Jewish resistance groups during the Holocaust did nothing remotely reminiscent of the Hamas massacre on October 7th, which included documented murders, mutilations, sexual crimes, and kidnappings of defenseless babies, grandmothers, and young girls. Yet here was a man, employed as a “Fellow in Human Rights,” publicly implying that at least some of the Jews deserved the Nazi Holocaust.
I have never once denied Palestinian civilian suffering. It is possible, and necessary, to distinguish between Israel’s legitimate actions against Hamas, a terror group that led a massacre of Israeli civilians, and indiscriminate violence against Palestinians. I believe that Israel has taken enormous pains to ensure its actions in Gaza avoid harming civilians to the extent possible in the inevitable chaos of war. I remain open to debating instances when Israel may have gone too far, and I support the IDF’s ongoing investigations into several controversial instances to determine accountability and improve future protocols.
Finkelstein says Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians because they are Palestinians. He says it about a war that began with the massacres of October 7th. To make the case, he dismisses every step Israel took to protect civilians in Gaza and treats statements Israeli politicians made in wartime, read without their context, as proof of a crime. Then he measures it all against the Holocaust. The Holocaust becomes a charge he can bring against Jews.
It’s no surprise that there are still people who hate Jews; anti-Jewish hatred has proved to be remarkably durable. But Albanese, Finkelstein, and Gurmendi aren’t just Internet commenters. They are constantly booked as experts on the Middle East. Albanese will continue writing UN reports about this conflict, and Gurmendi will keep teaching human rights at LSE. Within a few weeks, all three misused the history of the Holocaust while attacking Israel and Jews. That is not a coincidence. Their distortions and their attacks have the same source, and today, Albanese learned something new about the word most people still use to describe it.
Never forget that Norm Finkelstein is a psychopath who enjoys and approves of massacres of civilians, as he said on 10/7:
"I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled."
Mass murder warms every fiber of his soul! And he still shows his face in public!
Also, the dumb bigot Wilhelm Marr and his words and theories need to finally be retired. No more of the tired "Antisemitism"—it's JEW HATE. Jew hate is much more flexible and protean and covers all the different ways people have tried to smear and Other-ize Jews, whereas "Antisemitism" is just more stale racial classification.
And, sadly, even people born Jewish can become Jew haters, especially if they're obviously mentally ill.
The apology matters, and she deserves credit for making it plainly.
But consider what the error actually was. “Muselmann” was camp slang for prisoners so starved and broken they could no longer resist death—what Primo Levi called 'the drowned’ It is one of the Holocaust’s starkest words for its most completely destroyed victims. Albanese took that word and used it to argue that antisemitism was never really about Jews alone.
That isn’t merely a slip of definition. It became an argument, and it ran in one direction: toward dissolving the Jewishness of Jew-hatred at the one point in history where it is least deniable.
I can’t know her motives and won’t pretend to. But the UN Special Rapporteur whose mandate sits at the center of this conflict owes this history the same scrutiny she brings to everything else.