Francesca Albanese and the Lonely Road of Defiance
The U.N. special rapporteur is one of the most courageous crusaders against the genocide in Gaza. Because of this, she is blacklisted and treated as if she is a terrorist.

CHRIS HEDGES

 

NICE, France — It is a late November afternoon. I am driving to Genoa, Italy with Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. We are traveling to join striking dockworkers. The dockworkers call for a moratorium on weapons bound for Israel and a halt to the Italian government’s plans to increase military spending.

We speed past the inky waters of Baie des Anges on our right and the razor-backed French Alps on our left. Châteaus and clusters of houses with red-tiled roofs, shrouded in the fading light, are perched on the rolling hillsides. Palm trees line the seafront road.

Francesca — tall with flecks of gray in her hair and wearing large black-framed glasses and hoop earrings — is the bête noire of Israel and the United States. She was placedon the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of the U.S. Treasury Department — normally used to sanction those accused of money laundering or being involved with terrorist organizations — six days after the release of her report, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide.”

The OFAC list — weaponized by the Trump administration to persecute Francesca and in clear violation of the diplomatic immunity granted to U.N. officials — prohibits any financial institution from having someone on the list as a client. A bank that permits someone on the OFAC list to engage in financial transactions is banned from operating in dollars, faces multimillion-dollar fines and is blocked from international payment systems.

In her report, Francesca lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.

The report, which includes a database of over 1,000 corporate entities that collaborate with Israel, demands these firms and institutions sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes. It describes “Israel’s “forever-occupation” as “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech — providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.”

You can see my interview about the report with Francesca here.

Francesca, whose previous reports including “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” and “Genocide as colonial erasure” along with her empassioned denunciations of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza, have made her a lightning rod. She is excoriated every time she deviates from the approved script, including when pro-Palestine demonstrators stormed the headquarters of the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa while we were in Italy.

Francesca condemned the incursion and property destruction — protesters scattered newspapers and spray-painted slogans on the walls such as “Free Palestine” and “Newspapers complicit with Israel” — but added that it should serve as a “warning to the press” to do its job. That qualification expressed her frustration with the media’s discrediting of the reporting of Palestinian journalists — over 278 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7 along with over 700 of their family members — and uncritical amplification of Israeli propaganda. But it was seized upon by her critics, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, to lynch her.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on Francesca in July.

“The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur,” the State Department’s press release read. “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West. That bias has been apparent across the span of her career, including recommending that the ICC, without a legitimate basis, issue arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.”

“She has recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC [International Criminal Court ] pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives,” it went on. “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

The sanctions followed those imposed in February and June on the court’s prosecutor Karim Khan along with two judges for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.

Francesca is barred from entering the U.S. even to appear at the United Nations in New York City, to present one of her two annual reports. The other is delivered at the United Nations Office at Geneva.

Francesca’s assets in the U.S. have been frozen, including her bank account and her U.S. apartment. The sanctions cut her off from the international banking system, including blocking her use of credit cards. Her private medical insurance refuses to reimburse her medical expenses. Hotel rooms booked under her name have been cancelled. She can only operate using cash or by borrowing a bank card.

Institutions, including U.S. universities, human rights groups, professors and NGOs, that once cooperated with Francesca, have severed ties, fearful of penalties established for any U.S. citizen who collaborates with her. She and her family receive frequent death threats. Israel and the U.S. have mounted a campaign to get her removed from her U.N post.

Francesa is proof that when you stand steadfastly with the oppressed, you will be treated like the oppressed.

She is unsure if her book, “When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine,” which has been translated into English and is expected to be released in April next year, will be distributed in the U.S.

“I’m a sanctioned person,” she says ruefully.

But she is not cowed. Her next salvo will be a report that documents the torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. While torture, she says, was “not widespread,” before Oct. 7, it has now become ubiquitous. She is collecting testimonies of those released from Israeli detention.

“It reminds me of the stories and testimonies I read from Argentina’s dictatorship,” Francesca tells me. “It’s that bad. It’s systemic torture against the same people. The same people are taken, raped and brought back, taken, raped and brought back.”

“Women?” I ask.

“Both,” she answers.

“To have women tell you they have been raped, multiple times. They’ve been asked to masturbate soldiers. This is incredible,” Francesca says. “For a woman to say that. Imagine what they have endured? There are people who have lost their words. They cannot talk. They cannot speak after what they’ve endured.”

Establishment media organizations, she says, not only dutifully parrot back Israeli lies, but routinely block reporting that reflects negatively on Israel.

“In April, I reported the first cases of sexual harassment and rape that had taken place in January and February 2024,” she says. “People didn’t want to listen. The New York Times interviewed me for two hours. Two hours. They didn’t write a line about it.”

“The Financial Times had — because of the relevance of the topic — an embargo’d version of ‘From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,’” she says. “They didn’t publish it. They didn’t even publish a review, an article, days after the press conference. But they did publish a critique of my report. I had a meeting with them. I said, ‘This is really depressing. Who are you? Are you paid for the work you do? Who are you loyal to, your readers?’ I pushed them. They said, ‘Well, we didn’t find that it was up to our standards.’”

This, I tell her, is how the New York Times would spike stories by reporters that editors deem too incendiary.

“They discredit your sources regardless of what your sources are,” I tell her. “That becomes the vehicle by which they don’t publish. This isn’t a good faith discussion. They’re not giving a fair analysis of what your sources are. They are categorically dismissing them. They’re not telling you the truth, which is, ‘We don’t want to deal with Israel and the Israel lobby.’ That’s the truth. They don’t say that. It is always, ‘It’s not up to our standards.’”

“There is no free media, no free press in Italy anymore,” Francesca laments. “There is, but it’s fringe or on the margins. It is an exception. The main newspapers are held by groups connected to big powers, financial and economic powers. The government controls — directly or indirectly — much of Italian TV.”

The drift towards fascism in Europe and the United States, Francesca says, is intimately tied to the genocide, as is the emerging resistance.

“There is a brewing anger and dissatisfaction with political leadership in Europe,” she says. “There is also a fear that lingers in many countries because of the rise of the right. We’ve been there. There are people who have living memories of fascism in Europe. The scars of Nazi-fascism are still there, even the trauma. People cannot process what has happened and why it’s happened. Palestine has shocked people. Italians in particular. Maybe because we are who we are in the sense that we cannot be silenced that easily, we cannot be scared as has happened to the Germans and the French. I was shocked in France. The fear and repression is incredible. It is not as bad as Germany, but it’s much worse than it was two years ago. The minister of education in France cancelled an academic conference on Palestine at the Collège de France — the highest institution in France. The minister of education! And he bragged about it.”

Francesca says our only hope now is civil disobedience, embodied in actions such as strikes that disrupt commerce and government or the attempts by the flotillas to reach Gaza.

“The flotillas created this sense of ‘Oh, something can be done,’” she says. “We are not powerless. We can make a difference even in shaking the ground, rocking the boat. Then the workers have come in. The students have already been mobilized. There has been a sense through the various protests that we can still change things. People have started to connect the dots.”

Francesca presented her 24-page report “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” to the U.N. General Assembly in October, a report that had to be delivered remotely from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa, because of the sanctions.

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, following her presentation, said, “Ms. Albanese, you are a witch and this report is another page in your spellbook.” He accused her of trying to “curse Israel with lies and hatred.”

“Every page of this report is an empty spell, every accusation, a charm that does not work, because you are a failed witch,” Danon continued.

“It triggered a moment of enlightenment.” Francesca says of the insults. “I connected it to the injustice that women have suffered through the centuries.”

“What is happening to the Palestinians and to those who are speaking out for the Palestinians, is the 2025 equivalent of burning witches in the public square,” she goes on. “It was done to scientists and theologians who didn’t align with the Catholic Church. It was done to women who held the power of herbs. It was done to religious minorities, to indigenous people, like the Sámi people.”

“Palestine,” Francesca says, “has opened a portal to history, to where we come from and to what we risk if we don’t pull the brakes.”

---------------

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/francesca-albanese-and-the-lonely?

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

 

What Does Venezuela Have to Do with Israel?

It may have friends that Netanyahu does not like

BY PHILIP GIRALDI

 

It is interesting to observe how United States foreign policy, such as it is, often appears to have an Israeli back story that explains at least in part how Donald Trump’s mindless aggression against much of the world is driven by Zionist imperatives rather than actual American interests. Ukraine is supported by Israel and the US Israel Lobby in part because the roots of many diaspora and Israeli Jews are “Kazarian,” i.e. they derive from that part of Eastern Europe. Plus, Ukraine’s acting head of state Volodymyr Zelensky is a Jew whose mother and father reportedly live in Israel in a posh residence paid for by the money stolen by their son from US and European donations to Kiev to fight Russia. Also, the Jewish antipathy towards Moscow in large part derives from the belief that Imperial Russia was the source of many pogroms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That narrative fails, however, to mention how Russian Jews turned Bolshevik and, becoming enforcers of the Communist Revolution, subsequently got their revenge a hundred-fold on Russian and other Eastern European Christians.

And, of course, it has been frequently observed how US policy in the Middle East is essentially dictated by war criminal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who de facto controls both Trump and the US Congress. The Israel Lobby also has significant input into what goes on in state and local government levels and has considerable control over what appears in the national media, which they increasingly own thanks to the efforts of Jewish billionaires like Larry Ellison. This ability to use money to manipulate politics and government has been manifested in the ability to suppress free speech in the United States when the topic is Israel’s abhorrent behavior towards the Palestinians and its other neighbors. Criminalizing antisemitism, which includes any criticism of Israel, has become the crime du jour to silence opposition to pro-Zionist agendas at both federal and state level and it has also been used to eliminate Palestinian support at universities and in the job market. Beyond that, the US State Department is now demanding access to the social media of visa applicants so that those who are supporters of the Palestinian cause can be blocked from entry into the United States. This is what Jewish power in America is all about.

It is interesting to note the somewhat unexpected Israeli and Jewish hand in recent US aggression directed particularly against Venezuela. There are several main reasons for the Venezuela hit. Caracas developed a close relationship with Iran through its negotiations over BRICS and has unambiguously sided with Palestine in denouncing the Zionist war crimes and crimes against humanity. This clearly was impressed upon Donald Trump and his consiglieri by the Israelis and members of the Israeli Lobby like Miriam Adelson and Laura Loomer who have full access to the president and who no doubt were able to convince the Orangeman that he would be able to benefit by striking against an ally of a common enemy of the US and Israel with one fell swoop.

Trump could and did plead nevertheless that he was only applying his heavily promoted “corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” which he inevitably dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” and which was explicit in the new National Security Strategy. But he surely knew that he would also at the same time be satisfying the demands of his Jewish donors and Netanyahu himself, who undoubtedly raised the issue of Venezuela with the president and his staff on his recent visit to Florida.

So the possibility that there just might be a relationship between Venezuela and Iran has become something that is exploitable by the Israel Lobby and also by Trump. On his recent visit, Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to identify the issue and no doubt also personally pushed for Trump to do something right away. Bibi also appeared on US television and told one interviewer that Iran is “exporting terrorism… to Venezuela. They’re in cahoots with the Maduro regime… this has got to change.” The Israelis also see ties between Caracas and both Hamas and Hezbollah, a claim that has been echoed in the US national-Zionist-at-all-times media.

To cite only one example of how it works, Fox News has published an article claiming Maduro’s Venezuela has become “Hezbollah’s most important base of operations in the Western Hemisphere, strengthened by Iran’s growing footprint and the Maduro regime’s protection.” Ultra-Zionist US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, not to be outdone, later doubled down, stating publicly that the US overthrow of Maduro was good news for Israel because of Venezuela’s partnership with Iran and Hezbollah.

The New York Times meanwhile has soft-pedaled its news coverage of the Caracas attack and instead has featured several prominent Zionist opinion contributors who have argued that for those Middle Eastern connections alone Venezuela has deserved everything that it has so far received at the hands of the US military. The always reliable Israeli firster Bret Stephens opined that There Were Good Reasons to Depose Maduro citing the Venezuelan Vice-and-Acting President Delcy Rodríguez having “claimed Maduro’s capture had ‘Zionist undertones,’ suggesting that her grip on reality may not be what the [Trump] administration hopes.”

And on the same day in The Times there appeared good old reliable Elliott Abrams in his A Defense of US Intervention in Venezuela claiming that he knows things about the threat posed by Venezuela that no one else seems to be aware of aside from him and his Zionist buddies. He states that “…they have invited into Venezuela Cuban thugs, and Hezbollah and Iran, as well as Russia and China. So, it’s a security issue for the whole region, again, including for the United States. For Hezbollah, for example, and Iran, we know that the Maduro regime gave them blank passports so that agents of Iran and Hezbollah could be moving around Latin America and elsewhere under false identities. We know that Iran has helped not only give drones to the Venezuelan military, but helped them learn how to build drones. We know from the Israeli experience with Iran, drones can go a very long distance now. We’re talking about drones that can hit not only Puerto Rico, but hit the continental United States. When I was in the State Department doing this about five years ago, Iran was contemplating giving intermediate-range missiles, which could reach the United States, to the Maduro regime in Venezuela. So this is an actual security threat in Latin America and to us.”

So Israel and its friends were no doubt delighted when Donald Trump decided to attack Venezuela and kidnap its president Nicolas Maduros. Netanyahu personally thanked Washington after the Venezuela attack took place, tweeting that “Congratulations, President @realDonaldTrump for your bold and historic leadership on behalf of freedom and justice. I salute your decisive resolve and the brilliant action of your brave soldiers.”

Perhaps this extra agenda in support of Israel explains why Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodriguez has herself gone on television to say her country will not be “cowed” by Washington. As Bret Stephens maintains, she also believes that “Venezuela is the victim and target of an attack of this nature, which undoubtedly has Zionist undertones. It is truly shameful.” To be sure there is one thing that is true, that as Venezuela is critical of Israeli war crimes, its government has broken diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv and recognized Palestinian statehood. It might therefore very plausibly be suggested that Netanyahu, speaking for his government, which in return has been openly supporting regime change in Venezuela, played the decisive role in convincing his pliable tool Trump to move on Caracas sooner rather than later when they met recently in Mar-del-Lago.

So the attack on Venezuela has opened the door to all kinds of complications and intrigue. Given the ability of the Israelis to manipulate an ignorant and confused Trump, who now claims his policies are guided only by his “morality” rather than “international rule of law,” the next developments will almost certainly include a joint Israel-US attack on Iran. And when that initiative has run out there will certainly be still more enemies of Israel to confront. And what will be the benefit for the average American when all the costs and deaths are counted after it is all over? As usual, “Nothing!”

 

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/what-does-venezuela-have-to-do-with-israel/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951

 

 

SEE ALSO: https://www.rt.com/news/630793-us-kidnap-netanyahu-maduro-pakistan/

US should have kidnapped Netanyahu instead of Maduro – Pakistani official     The Israeli prime minister is the “worst criminal of humanity,” the Pakistani defense minister has claimed

 

 

 

Genocide Isn’t a Mistake. Which Is Why the Media Can’t Tell You the Truth About Gaza

By Jonathan Cook

 

The Voice of Hind Rajab, a devastating dramatised retelling of Israel’s slow-motion murder of a five-year-old in Gaza, arrives in UK cinemas next week. Please take the opportunity to see it. The vast majority of Americans were denied such an opportunity when it was released there last month.

Here’s what happened to the film in the US, via New York Times columnist M Gessen:

The Voice of Hind Rajab had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September and took the Grand Jury Prize, the second-highest honor. A few days later, it was screened to great acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival.

High-profile US distribution companies came calling. But then, the producers Odessa Rae and Elizabeth Woodward told me, one by one the companies peeled off.

In the end, Woodward, who has a small distribution company, put together something akin to self-distribution. The movie opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday. Elsewhere in the world this film, shortlisted for the Oscar for best foreign movie, has major distributors – but not in the United States or Israel. That’s a kind of coordination, too.

That may be the nearest you will hear the New York Times admitting to an Israel lobby and its extraordinary power to shape the West’s cultural and information landscape.

It is almost impossible to get serious criticism of the Israeli state, which (falsely) claims to represent the Jewish people, anywhere near mainstream US culture, even when it takes the form of a critically acclaimed movie, backed by Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix, that received a record 23-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.

For decades, pro-Israel lobby groups have dedicated their efforts to telling us that antisemitism is rampant across the West and takes the form of opposition of Israel – a message endlessly amplified by the western media.

Note this: the “antisemitism” threat just so happens to have grown precisely in line with the realisation among an ever-widening section of western publics that Israel is operating a system of apartheid rule over Palestinians and is now committing genocide in Gaza.

The role of the lobby, so readily given a platform by the establishment media, is to conflate any resulting increase in criticism of Israel with an increase in antisemitism. The solution, it hardly needs pointing out, is to shut down criticism of Israel to reduce antisemitism.

With this logic dominant among the professional class in the West – in fact, with it serving as the price of admission to that class – it is presumably easy to warn off film distribution executives from allowing into US cinemas a film that bears witness to Israel’s killing of a five-year-old.

Hind Rajab’s murder, of course, was nothing exceptional. Tens of thousands of other children in Gaza have suffered similar fates at the hands of the Israeli army over the past 27 months, though their horrifying experiences have not been turned into a movie.

Like anyone trying to get more real information about Israel into the mainstream, I have direct experience of these difficulties myself. As a journalist at the Guardian 30 years ago, I found that my new-found interest in the Israel-Palestine issue after I had completed a masters in Middle East studies propelled me headlong into conflict with senior editors. It was an experience I had never had before, and one I was totally unprepared for.

What disorientated me at the time was that my editors were barely concerned whether a story about Israel was true or not, or whether it was interesting or not. Or whether I could make a good case based on reliable sources. It soon became clear to me that the yardstick they were employing was whether my proposed piece would undermine Israel’s moral case for being considered a self-declared “Jewish and democratic state”.

Note that the Guardian was and is exceptional compared to the rest of the British media in permitting trenchant criticism of Israel. But that criticism was, nonetheless, highly circumscribed. The paper made a clear distinction between Israel’s occupation, which it regarded largely as an unwarranted, criminal enterprise, and Israel’s status as a self-professed Jewish state.

Israel’s “Jewishness” was treated as a moral, unquestionable necessity and a safeguard against antisemitism.

In practice, this meant I could submit articles exposing the crimes Israel was committing in Palestinian areas under occupation, but only in so far as those related to the inevitable problems Israel had enforcing its “security” in the inherently insecure environment produced by its army illegally occupying another people.

Such articles were allowed on condition they did not conflict with the paper’s core editorial premise that, were Israel to leave the occupied territories and return to its internationally recognised borders, all would be well.

No articles were allowed – whether reports from the occupied territories or from inside Israel – that indicated there were inherent problems with the notion of Israel as a Jewish state, or questioned the assumption that a state defining itself in ethno-religious terms could also be a democracy.

This was the unspoken editorial formula:

• Articles suggesting that the occupied territories were a gangrenous limb that needed amputating – ok.
• Articles suggesting that the illegal occupation was a natural outgrowth of a highly militarised state, driven by an expansionist ideology of Jewish supremacy that necessarily dehumanises Palestinians – not ok.

That is the reason the Guardian, like so many others, has struggled to come to terms with Israel’s genocide in Gaza over the past two years.Genocide, and the overwhelming support for it among Israeli Jews, hints at a sickness within the Israeli state itself and the ideology of Zionism. That dark underbelly of ethnic nationalism cannot simply be amputated, like a gangrenous toe. The whole body politic is infected. A holistic, root-and-branch solution is needed, as it was with apartheid South Africa. A process of decolonisation must be instituted, a programme of truth and reconciliation is required.

There are similar reasons why the Voice of Hind Rajab did not made it into US cinemas. Because the Israeli army’s attack on the car containing Hind and her family, the Israeli army’s long delaying tactics before allowing an ambulance to tend to Hind, and the Israeli strike on the ambulance after its route had been approved cannot be explained by a mistake, or even a series of mistakes.

Just as Israel’s murder of tens of thousands of children like Hind, and the starvation of the rest, cannot be explained by a mistake.

These aren’t mistakes. Genocide isn’t a mistake. It is evidence of a deeply sick society, driven into the darkest of places by a racist ideology that says Jewish lives count and Palestinian lives don’t.

Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.

https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/11/genocide-isnt-a-mistake-which-is-why-the-media-cant-tell-you-the-truth-about-gaza/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.