UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese issued a public apology on Monday, admitting she had misrepresented both the meaning of antisemitism and a term used in Nazi concentration camps.
"I sincerely apologize," Albanese wrote on X. "I misread the term 'Muselmann' (Muslim) used in Nazi camps for prisoners at the brink of death, wrongly inferring that the term antisemitism originally meant hatred of all Semitic peoples. In fact it was coined specifically to denote hatred of Jews."
The apology followed an interview with the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of State Workers (CLATE), in which Albanese claimed that "Jews were called 'the Muslims'" in the camps. She made the claim as part of a broader argument that antisemitism originally targeted all "Semitic peoples" rather than Jews specifically. She also said that when the word was coined, it referred to anyone who was not European and came from the Middle East, and only came to be associated with Jews because they were the largest non-Christian minority in Europe at the time.
In fact, "Muselmann," German for "Muslim," was camp slang for inmates suffering from extreme exhaustion and severe starvation. The term antisemitism was popularized in 1879 by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr to describe campaigns hostile to Jews.
Yad Vashem rebuked Albanese's remarks, saying that "Muselmann" was not a term specifically for Jews and does not prove that Nazi antisemitism connected Jews and Muslims. The Holocaust memorial said that by misusing the term as evidence of a racial category, Albanese fundamentally distorted its historical meaning, and advised her to familiarize herself with the history she seeks to address before making assertions about it.
UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer accused Albanese of completely rewriting the meaning of antisemitism and distorting the history of the Holocaust, stressing that the term was coined specifically to describe hostility toward Jews and that the Nazis targeted Jews as Jews.
Albanese, an Italian lawyer appointed in 2022 as special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, has drawn repeated criticism from Israel, the United States and several European governments over comments they say distort history or minimize antisemitism. Her apology did not address her broader record, and she remains in her UN post.
