Francesca Albanese is a powerful voice for justice, which is why the Israel lobby is trying to silence her
Francesca Albanese in Bogotá, Colombia, in July 2025
Michael Lynk writes in Mondoweiss on 24 February 2026:
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.”