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(TJV NEWS) United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese told an Al Jazeera Forum audience on Saturday that humanity is now facing a “common enemy,” delivering remarks sharply critical of Israel during a panel discussion focused on the Palestinian issue, as The Jerusalem Post reported.
Albanese appeared via video link on a panel titled “The Palestinian Cause in a World Moving Toward Multipolarity.” The forum also featured senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, according to The Jerusalem Post. Her participation alongside figures from Hamas and Iran drew immediate criticism from Israeli officials.
During her remarks, Albanese condemned countries that continue diplomatic ties and arms trade with Israel and accused the international community of failing to act during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, now entering its second year, The Jerusalem Post reported. She also argued that Western media outlets have played a role in amplifying what she described as a “genocidal narrative,” framing the situation as both a challenge and an opportunity for international law.
“The fact that most of the media in the Western world has been amplifying … the genocidal narrative is a challenge,” Albanese said, according to remarks cited by The Jerusalem Post. She added that what she views as a breakdown of international law has revealed broader global challenges.
Albanese went on to say that humanity “now has a common enemy,” arguing that respect for fundamental freedoms represents the last remaining peaceful means to secure global justice and freedom. “We need to stand up, we need to do the right thing,” she said during the forum.
Images circulated from previous events show Albanese attending an emergency conference hosted by Colombia and South Africa in Bogotá in July 2025 to discuss potential measures against Israel, underscoring her continued involvement in international efforts critical of Israeli policy, The Jerusalem Post noted.
Her appearance at the Al Jazeera forum prompted swift condemnation from Israeli officials. Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, described her participation as a “profound failure” of the international system in a post on X, according to The Jerusalem Post. Danon accused Albanese of using her UN role to promote what he characterized as extremist narratives, pointing specifically to her decision to appear alongside Khaled Mashaal.
Israel’s Ambassador to the European Union, Avi Nir-Feldklein, also criticized the UN rapporteur’s participation. In a public statement addressed to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Nir-Feldklein questioned how a UN official could justify appearing at a forum run by Al Jazeera alongside representatives of Iran and Hamas, organizations Israel considers central actors in regional violence, as reported by The Jerusalem Post.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who also spoke at the forum, focused much of his address on the Palestinian issue, calling it the defining question of justice in the Middle East. He accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and argued that the conflict has undermined the global legal order, according to The Jerusalem Post. Araghchi did not address Iran’s domestic unrest or the government’s response to protests in recent years.
Araghchi further called for international sanctions on Israel, an immediate arms embargo, and the suspension of military and intelligence cooperation. He also reiterated demands for a right of return for Palestinians who left the territory. In a separate interview excerpt aired by Al Jazeera, Araghchi stated that Iran would continue uranium enrichment, calling it an “inalienable right,” while maintaining that Iran’s nuclear dispute could only be resolved through negotiations.
The forum and Albanese’s participation continue to fuel controversy over the role of UN officials in highly politicized international platforms, an issue that Israeli officials argue undermines the credibility and neutrality of the United Nations, as The Jerusalem Post has reported.
By GINETTE WEINER MARCH 2, 2025 https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-843641
How many more times must we bear witness to antisemitism? -Opinion
The 2023 film Bearing Witness witnesses thousands blaming Jews, blaming the Jewish state, for being butchered, raped, their children beheaded. If we thought humans couldn’t reach new depths post-Holocaust, we were wrong.
In 1969, at age 18, I went to Israel. My aunt took me to Yad Vashem, my first time. I held my tears in until the very last exhibit. I saw a silent towering pile of children’s shoes – worn, scuffed, shoelaces torn. I broke down sobbing. In 2015, again in Israel, I went through the Yad Vashem Children’s Memorial. It was hollowed out from an underground cavern, darkly lit, with uneven steps, keeping you unbalanced. The ceiling is filled with stars for each of these murdered children. As you walk slowly through, you hear the names of the 1.5 million slaughtered Jewish children called out, one by one. The unbearable ache never completely goes away.
One little girl stays with me. She is never far from my consciousness. The Holocaust documentary shows her trying to roll up the sleeve on her tattered coat, as she was asked to do, to show the tattoo of the number on her tiny arm. She did this with earnestness and intensity, as if to say to the world, to someone, to anyone, “If I do what I’m told, if I am a good girl, maybe this nightmare will stop.” It did not stop.
As I write this now, my tears welled up again, for this little girl, and the millions like her who were butchered just because they were Jews. I never thought that in 2023 I would again be sobbing with rage and grief for Jewish Israeli children literally torn apart, beheaded, women raped, their naked, dead bodies stomped on, the dead paraded like war trophies, families trapped, their charred remains found, and a video of a young woman, kidnapped and burned alive, as she writhed on the ground in pain. At least the Nazis gassed us before cremating us, although towards the end, as the Allies were descending, they threw Jewish children alive into the ovens.
“‘Where are you?” – a question that so many asked God during the Holocaust, and which so many of us have been asking God ever since – is not a question for us to ask God but a question for God to ask us. Where was the moral compass of the millions who simply looked the other way as the Nazis and their army of willing executioners perpetrated such monstrous evil? Rather than honestly confront this standing question, people instead tried to excuse their inaction. Too often, they justified their failure to accept our moral obligations to one another by hiding behind another question.” – Elders of Zion
The lies we bear witness to in the media
And now, we again hear those hiding behind more “questions” and false accusations. We bear witness to mainstream media calling Hamas “militants” vs. genocidal terrorists, and calling “Palestinian” terrorists “activists.” If beheading children is now under the amoral Orwellian
definition of “militants,” what does this tell us about our future to remain civilized? We witness worldwide rallies, once again blaming Jews, blaming the Jewish state for being butchered by Islamic Jihad Hamas whose charter and stated goals openly say it will rid the Middle East of all Jews, then go after us worldwide.
Some say, “Well, we don’t go along with what Hamas has done, but we still blame Israel for what Hamas did.” That is as amoral as saying “We don’t go along with what the Nazis did to Jews, but we support their reasons for murdering them. They deserved it.’
Blaming Israel for the plight of Arabs in Gaza whose homes have been destroyed, instead of blaming Hamas and Gaza for brutalizing Arabs living in Gaza for years, only serves to perpetuate Hamas’s ability to oppress their people. Hamas and Fatah opted for more jihad, built terror tunnels inside homes and mosques to plot kidnappings, smuggle arms, and construct launch pads among UN facilities and schools.
British commentator Melanie Phillips wrote: “The ignorant and malicious lie of Israeli ‘oppression’ and injustice is embedded in Western ‘progressive’ circles. Totally ignoring the Palestinians’ genocidal antisemitism, this narrative has sanitised, emboldened, and incentivised Palestinian incitement against Israel and the Jewish people for decades. Jews on the Left, including those now wringing their hands over the massacre in Israel, are complicit in this malignant echo chamber. They are part of a Western culture that is no longer prepared to recognise evil. It seeks instead to ascribe it to motives like oppression. It tells itself that every aggressive cause is amenable to compromise. It refuses to accept that sometimes there’s no alternative but to fight until the forces of evil are crushed by a military victory. By refusing to accept this, such ‘progressives’ sentence countless innocents to die. That is what has happened in Israel. That’s why yet more innocents there will be slaughtered, and yet more young Israeli conscripts are now being sent into the line of fire. Israel will fight to destroy this evil because it has no choice. Many Western progressives have chosen to support evil instead.”
So, to all the media who fail to do any fact-based, objective research, to those who base their opinions on the Big Lies put forth, and to all the just plain Jew haters out there, who have always needed a bogeyman to blame for their woes, do us a favor. Find someone else for a change to blame, like Abbas or Hamas or Hezbollah or Fatah, whose collective and individual Jew hate are bottomless, violent, and barbaric and who won’t stop until there are no Jews left on Earth.
We’ve already been scattered to the ends of the Earth, post-Holocaust. We’ve had more than our share of the world’s hatred, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Holocaust, and now in 2023, butchering, burning, beheading Israeli Jewish children and adults.
Leave us alone. “Never again” means never again. This time, we will take you down with us if forced to.■
The writer is a commentator in Jewish and mainstream newspapers, and lecturer on strategies for combating media bias, antisemitism, and BDS. She has an MSW and a certification in “Understanding Media Bias & Israel Advocacy: Defending Israel from Media Bias”, 23rd Mission to Israel, HonestReporting: June, 2015.
Is it possible to fool all of the people, all of the time? Yes, it is. Just mix together generous helpings of these ingredients, with guaranteed results.
Turn so called “Palestinian” Arab oppressors into victims.
Reframe their rejection of Israel as a “cause” for justice, human rights.
Ensure your Big Lies are jaw dropping horrors designed to instill instant disgust, along with knee jerk indignation.
Ignore these Arabs daily genocidal Jew hate speech on Palestinian Media Watch.
Ignore refusals for statehood & peace offers: 1948, 1967, 2000-2001, 2005 and 2008.
Ignore refusals to accept Israel with any boundaries.
Ignore Arab Israeli citizens full civil, legal and religious rights, in stark contrast to any of their Arab neighbors.
Single out only the Jewish State of Israel for obsessive false blame.
Ignore true atrocities in Syria; Hamas using millions to build tunnels of terror vs. communities of peace and prosperity; The Islamic Republic of Iran’s brutal executions; Somalia’s 98% female genital mutilation.
Count on the average citizen, students, intersectional perpetual victims, western mainstream media to take the path of least resistance, fail to do any research or homework on facts.
Stir ingredients. Be relentless. Then sit back and savor the results. You will know your cake is done when Jews in America need to hide any signs of being a Jew when they leave their homes, when being labeled a white, colonialist oppressor, an apartheid subhuman is the new norm. Your decades of hard work is not without its rewards. You graduated from just peddling lies to assaulting Jews, with impunity, on our streets, en route to synagogues, in restaurants, at rallies. And don’t forget to count this astonishing windfall—the totality of the collective failure of American Jewish organizations to get even basic facts about Israel to themselves, the public at large, to mainstream media, on campuses or to our elected leaders. If you are a Jew, a Zionist, an Israel supporter, you are already on the menu for ostracization and elimination.
“The Boston area “Mapping Project” is put together by the Boycott, intersectional, anti-Israel mob. The map includes Jewish and Israeli institutions, such as the Synagogue Council of Mass., Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, two Jewish newspapers, and more. It is tapping into millennia-old antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish wealth, control, conspiracy…Mapping Project’s “underlying messages are clear: Jews are responsible for the ills of our community and if you maintain your relationship with Jewish organizations, you will share that responsibility.”https://thejewishvoice.com/2022/06/invitation-to-violence-anti-israel-groups-map-puts-target-on-boston-jews/
Imagine if someone put out a target map of Blacks or Hispanics or Muslims. Mainstream media would be up in arms but when it’s Jewish institutions…we hear the usual deafening silence.
“One revelation made obvious with the publication of this map is that the enemies of Zionism and Israel, who usually mask their anti-Semitism by contending that criticism of the Jewish state is never anti-Semitic, now apparently feel comfortable enough to engage in public, blatant attacks on Jews, Judaism, and Jewish communal and civil rights organizations as part of their contention that it is Jews, not just the Jewish state, who are guiding and maintaining this oppression.” https://thejewishvoice.com/2022/06/the-odious-mapping-project/
Common knowledge, bears repeating: Before and since Israel became a legal nation, they were repeatedly attacked by Arabs who eventually realized their only hope of eliminating Israel was to begin waging their biased war of words. They are winning. Several authors recently wrote about Nazi and Russian propaganda techniques which were adopted by the “Palestinian” Arabs, most notably Arafat and Abbas, who learned their goose step lessons well. Ziva Dahl’s, “Russia Perfected Disinformation Decades Ago — Against Israel” is a definitive milestone, a must read.
Melanie Phillips, “For the Jews, History Repeats Itself in Ukraine”, says it as well:
“Now where have we heard this before, where the victims of an attempt to erase them from the map are themselves accused falsely of genocide?…This is precisely what the “Palestinians” have done to Israel. For decades, they have promoted the big lie that they are the indigenous people of the land, that the Jews were the colonizers who deprived them of their rights and that the Israelis continue to oppress and practice “genocide” against them. Every part of that is not only untrue but it is the “Palestinians” who seek aggressive conquest and the Israelis who are victims of their terror.
This big lie about Israel was created in the 1960s when the “Palestinian” terrorist leader Yasser Arafat made common cause with the Soviet Union to rewrite history, demonize the Jewish state and subvert the west by twisting its collective mind and destroying its moral compass. This was laid out by General Ion Pacepa, the former head of Romania’s foreign intelligence service, who played a significant role in Soviet bloc operations directed against Israel and the US and who defected to the west in 1978. According to Pacepa, the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, told him, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.” This mind-bending has resulted in Israel’s demonization in the West.” https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/03/04/for-the-jews-history-repeats-itself-in-ukraine/
“Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared his support for Putin’s stance on Ukraine during a phone call between the two men on Monday. Abbas has a close personal relationship with Russia that mirrors the historically warm ties between Moscow and the PLO. In the early 1980s, Abbas studied in the Soviet Union, where he was awarded a doctorate for a dissertation falsely alleging that the Zionist movement was just as culpable as the Nazi regime for the Holocaust during World War II.”
https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/04/18/pa-president-abbas-expresses-support-for-putin-over-ukraine-invasion-as-russia-slams-israeli-illegal-occupation/
Still wonder if you are on the menu?
“How AP Teaches Its Journalists to Whitewash the Bloody Truth About Hamas.”
“The Associated Press’ guidance for journalists on how to reference Hamas is based on a grossly inaccurate description of the organization’s mission, vision, and bloody track record.
As a result, AP journalists are being taught to whitewash the actions of a terror group that seeks to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/05/15/how-ap-teaches-its-journalists-to-whitewash-the-bloody-truth-about-hamas/
Since 2015, in print, I have relentlessly warned about this storm coming at us, asking for calls to action. I am still waiting. I am waiting for American Jewish “leaders” to put their differences aside, collaborate with Israel, (and worldwide Jewry), and fund our own giant Public Relations Agency to get basic, accurate truths out about Israel and refute the Big Lies.
I am still waiting for American Jews to unite, proactively demand Our Jewish Civil Rights, demand, not beg, the IHRA be accepted by all who walk this earth. I have been waiting for our community to be as relentlessly aggressive as our haters are. I am waiting for full page ads, nationwide billboards, exposing the genocidal, eliminate Israel, Arab Jew hate speech, in their words, not yours, not mine, for mainstream media, for all to hear and read, documented by Palestinian Media Watch. In whose world is exposing Jew hate speech bigoted? Tell that to the German Jews of the 1930’s while Hitler drummed it up.
https://palwatch.org/:
“Murder of Israeli athletes in Munich is a “heroic operation” according to Abbas’ Fatah.
“Palestinian children recite poems on official PA TV stating that “our enemy, Zion, is Satan with a tail,” Jews are “the most evil among creations, barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs.”
“For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Palestinian Authority, in a program on official PA TV, the host taught viewers that the Holocaust was the price the Jews paid for their evil behavior – their “conspiracies and wickedness.”
I hear only the usual reactive vs. proactive, defensive, apologetic, bent over posturing from American Jewish “leaders”, almost always only in response to the latest attack on us. And this, only some 80 years after Jewish children were thrown alive into the crematoriums, as the Allies descended upon the death camps.
If our collective wisdom is failing us, if our collective chutzpah is gone, and it is, perhaps it’s time to take some advice from an unlikely source, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, “In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given,” the crown prince said according to a wire sent by the Israeli consulate in New York…It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-crown-prince-told-palestinians-to-shut-up-and-stop-complaining-2018-4
I watch American Jews retreating to their respective bubbles. They shrug with resignation at the latest instance of Jew and Israel biased hate, almost accepting of it as part of the new norm, hoping it will go away. It is not going away. It is worse daily. If we can’t even unite and become loudly proactive when there is a literal target on our backs, then it is time to build bulletproof bubbles for your children. They will need them.
Ginette Weiner
Ginette Weiner
“Are you on the menu?”
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/are-you-on-the-menu/
excellent comments ..will the world listen?