One word in Francesca Albanese’s remarks exposes her entire argument. “Israel has always killed children,” the United Nations special rapporteur told a committee of the Irish Parliament.
Before the Israeli soldier was born, before the government was formed, and before the shot she was supposedly discussing was fired, she had already reached her verdict. That single word, “always,” reveals Albanese’s antisemitic audacity and perhaps raises questions about her state of mind.
There was no need to identify a place, a time, an act, or a person responsible. She asked her listeners to accept the outrageous claim that killing children is a permanent characteristic of the Jewish state. Anyone who speaks this way has already abandoned the question of what actually happened. She knew the answer the moment she heard the accused's identity.
At the same time, Albanese claimed that Palestinian detainees had been raped using dogs trained in Europe and that people in Europe were profiting from selling them. In the remarks attributed to her, she offered no evidence that dogs had been trained or traded for that reason. It was clearly an absurd story that she may not even believe herself.
What is infuriating is that once those words left the committee room, Israel was somehow expected to disprove this nonsense. Europeans were also assigned a role in the plot as people supposedly profiting from it.
One sentence was enough to place people on two continents in the defendant’s chair without identifying a single accused person whose response could be requested.
How do these statements align with Albanese’s response to the murder and rape of Israelis on October 7?
Human monsters hunted young people at the Nova music festival and dragged children and elderly people into Gaza for the sole crime of being Israeli. That is why the way she addressed the reports of rape cannot be accepted. In March 2024, she said that the reports she had read contained no evidence that convinced her.
That same month, Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, reported that there were reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang rape occurred in at least three locations during the attack. Regarding the hostages, the mission found clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, had taken place.
Faced with those findings, Albanese remained skeptical. Yet when leveling a horrifying accusation against Israel, her caution disappeared. What is an Israeli woman who survived the attack supposed to understand when she hears a UN rapporteur explain why the evidence failed to convince her?
The blood libel against the Jews preceded the Spanish Inquisition by centuries. In 1144, the body of a Christian boy named William was found near Norwich, England. The city’s Jews were accused of ritual murder. The lie later spread across Europe that Jews required the blood of Christian children to bake matzah.
A story passed from church to church and from one generation to the next, becoming so familiar that people believed it whenever they heard it. That was its deadly power. In every city, the child’s name could be changed while the identity of the accused remained the same.
The burden of proof rests with the accuser
As early as 1391, before the Spanish Inquisition, massacres were carried out against Jewish communities in Spain. Jews were murdered, and many were baptized as Christians to save their lives. Even baptism did not free them from suspicion.
In 1478, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella received papal authorization to establish the Spanish Inquisition. Among its earliest targets were Christians of Jewish ancestry suspected of secretly observing Jewish commandments.
The cruelty of this sequence deserves attention. First, Jews were forced to convert out of fear of their persecutors. In later generations, their descendants were also required to prove their Christianity was sincere.
In 1491, the Inquisition executed Jews and converts in the case known as the Holy Child of La Guardia. No family had reported a missing child. No body was found, and the identity of the supposedly murdered child was never established. The defendants, by contrast, had names and addresses.
A year later, the expulsion decree was issued, and the Jews of Spain were forced to choose between conversion and exile. This is where the warning for our generation lies. Once the identity of the accused is enough to convince the public of their guilt, even the simplest question begins to sound unnecessary.
Who was that child, and why did the judges convict the defendants of murdering him before it had even been established that a murder had occurred?
Anyone who believes this habit arose in response to the disturbing images from Gaza should return to October 8, 2023. Families in Israel were still trying to determine which of their loved ones had been murdered and which had been abducted.
That day, the Palestinian organization Stop the Wall issued a statement blaming Israel for the breach of the Gaza border fence and describing the years of blockade and bombardment preceding the attack as a “prelude to genocide.”
The sequence of events deserves careful attention. A person in Israel was still searching for a missing child. Someone else, already certain of who was to blame, placed responsibility on the side whose children had been abducted.
At Harvard, the verdict arrived even earlier. On October 7, dozens of student organizations signed a statement holding Israel entirely responsible for the violence. I would not expect an American student to have known every detail of the attack that morning. I would expect that student to understand that this was precisely why it was necessary to wait before signing a verdict.
There is also a price to the way we Israelis respond whenever we volunteer to prove that we are not the people our accusers describe. No country should be required to present a certificate of innocence covering every year of its existence. No people should have to seek acquittal for their existence.
That is the lesson to be drawn from Albanese’s appalling and baseless remarks. Anyone seeking to pass judgment in the name of human rights must respect one simple legal principle: the burden of proof rests with the accuser.
Israel has a duty not to remain silent in the face of Albanese’s antisemitic statements and to examine the possibility of pursuing legal action against her before a court with appropriate jurisdiction.
The writer is the CEO of Radios 100FM, an honorary consul and vice dean of the Consular Diplomatic Corps, president of the Israeli Radio Association, and previously served as a monitor for the Israeli Army Radio and as a television correspondent for NBC News.