Anatomy of an antisemite By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 29th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/anatomy-of-an-antisemite/

Francesca Albanese is at it again, cloaking her Jew-hatred in legalese and justifying it through denial. Yes, if there’s one thing that offends the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the so-called “occupied Palestinian territories,” it’s being exposed as an antisemite.

Not that it’s ever prevented the Italian international lawyer, who was appointed in 2022 to her three-year position, from going above and beyond the call of duty in bashing Israel at every opportunity. But her latest one-two-punch, in the form of a “report” on the war in Gaza, is a new low.
The document, titled “Anatomy of a Genocide,” is laden with footnotes to support its slanted hypotheses and wrong conclusions. It’s a practice that’s par for the course, so to speak, in the world of academia from which Albanese hails.

The problem isn’t with the headline of the 25-page screed. No, the name would be perfectly apt for a dissection of the religious-political ideology behind the Hamas-perpetrated massacre on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which coincided with Shabbat.

But in the Orwellian universe of the United Nations, where “Jewish lobby” conspiracy theorists like Albanese are embraced, right is wrong and good is evil. Hence, while the description of “genocide” in the report actually applies to the aims and behavior of Hamas, the “pay-for-slay” Palestinian Authority and all radical Islamists bent on the annihilation of the Jewish state, it is presented as proof of Israeli culpability—before and after Oct. 7.

Take, for instance, the passage stating that genocide is codified as “any of the [specified] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

The acts in question are specified as: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

It’s hard to come up with a better depiction of Hamas’s heinous crimes prior to, during and since its Black Sabbath rampage. It spent years launching rockets at Jewish communities to bring about their destruction; its foot soldiers invaded southern Israel nearly six months ago and slaughtered over a thousand Jews, while causing serious bodily and mental harm to many more; its goons abducted Jewish children (and adults), then transferred them to the terrorist tunnels and homes of “non-combatants” in Gaza.

The measures Hamas “imposed to prevent births” mainly involved murdering women and girls, gang-raping many before shooting, stabbing, beheading or burning them to death. The only caveat to the “birth prevention” clause is that those females still in captivity are subjected to violent sexual assaults, which may be resulting in pregnancies.

None of the above can be said about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, despite Albanese’s best efforts—and technical jargon—to deem it so. Still, painting the Jewish state as an illegal entity is the skill that landed her the U.N. gig and stamp of authority to invert victim and perpetrator.

Speaking of which, Albanese writes, “The perpetrator’s intent to destroy the group in whole or in part distinguishes genocidal acts from other international crimes.”

Indeed. Hamas has been committing genocidal acts against Jews since its establishment in 1987, with suicide bombings in Israeli buses, malls, cafes and any busy venue that it selected for maximum carnage.

Its bloody spree on Oct. 7 was made possible by decades of practice, planning and billions of dollars in foreign aid. The money was spent on weapons and the construction of a subterranean labyrinth—under hospitals, mosques and schools—for the purpose of wiping out Israel.

Sounds a lot like the “specific intent” that, according to Albanese, “may be established by direct evidence, e.g. statements by high command or official documents, or inferred from patterns of conduct.”

Aside from the Hamas charter, the updated (2017) version of which upholds that “resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honor for all the sons and daughters of our people and our Ummah,” the group’s leaders not only refuse to free the remaining 134 starving and abused hostages, but vow to repeat the deeds of Oct. 7 “again and again and again.”

Then there’s the issue of “indirect intent,” which the report says “can be inferred from facts or circumstances, including the overall context of the acts or omissions, scale of atrocities, systematic targeting of victims based on their affiliation with a particular group, perpetration of other ‘culpable acts’ directed against the group, or repetition of destructive and discriminatory acts.”

Talk about fitting Hamas to a T, especially regarding the “scale of atrocities” it carried out on Oct. 7. Yet the Albanese chronicle is devoted to pointing the finger at Israel.

Yes, she outright and upfront accuses the Jewish state of having perpetrated genocide against Palestinians in general, and specifically in the Gaza Strip, since Oct. 7. She assures, as well, that she “firmly condemns the crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups,” and urges the release of the hostages.

The reason cited for the report’s omission of the latter “events” is that they are “beyond the geographic scope of her mandate.” The truth, however, is that her hostility to the Jewish state knows no bounds.

Categorized under: ANTI-SEMITISM.
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