Francesca Albanese, the United Nations rapporteur assigned to monitor the Palestinian territories, has retracted her assertion that Nazi camp guards branded imprisoned Jews "Muslims", The Algemeiner reported.
The Italian-born official, who serves under a UN mandate covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, floated the claim while tracing the roots of antisemitism during a conversation with the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of State Workers (CLATE).
"When the term 'antisemitism' was first coined, it referred to anyone who wasn't European and came from the Middle East … in reality, the concept of antisemitism is broader," Albanese said, according to the newspaper.
Continuing her remarks, she added, "In fact, when they were taken to the gas chambers, there are some testimonies about life in the concentration camps that mention how Jews were referred to as 'Muslims',"
A rebuke soon followed from Hillel Neuer, who heads the Geneva-based watchdog group UN Watch, branding the rapporteur's framing as ill-informed and misleading.
"Francesca Albanese in this interview is not explaining antisemitism; she is completely rewriting its meaning, and in the process distorting the history of the Holocaust. Her remarks reveal astonishing ignorance, and malice," Neuer wrote in a social media post.
As criticism mounted, with detractors likening her remarks to a distortion of Holocaust history, Albanese subsequently issued a statement of contrition, stressing that antisemitism describes hostility toward Jews specifically.
"I sincerely apologize. I misread the term 'Muselmann' used in Nazi camps for prisoners at the brink of death, wrongly inferring that the term antisemitism originally meant hatred of all Semitic peoples," she wrote on X on Monday. "In fact, it was coined specifically to denote hatred of Jews."
Historians trace the word "antisemitism" to the late 1800s, crediting German journalist and agitator Wilhelm Marr with popularizing the German equivalent, Antisemitismus, during the 1870s as a label for hostility toward Jews. Even though "Semitic" originally denoted a family of languages encompassing Hebrew and Arabic, Marr and likeminded figures deliberately recast it as a racial category targeting Jews, casting anti-Jewish bigotry as ethnic or racial rather than purely theological. That framing built on far older strains of hatred directed at Jews.
Albanese, who trained as a lawyer before entering academia, has occupied the UN rapporteur post covering Palestinian-territory human rights since 2022, a role empowering her to document purported "human rights violations" she attributes to Israel in the West Bank and Gaza.
Following the October 7 massacre, Albanese labeled the Jewish state's response a "genocide" against Palestinians and circulated a widely challenged tally claiming 186,000 Gaza war deaths tied to Israeli action.
An investigation into Albanese was opened by the United Nations during the summer of 2024 over allegations that she accepted an Australia trip bankrolled by pro-Hamas groups, after she cheered anti-Israel demonstrators occupying US campuses, describing their movement as a "revolution" that gave her "hope."
The UN rapporteur has additionally cast Israelis as "foreign" Jews who displaced "indigenous" Palestinians to build an exclusionary ethnostate, a characterization critics say erases millennia of continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel. She has also repeatedly branded the Jewish state a "colonial" project, likening it to British India or French Algeria.
Albanese was recently caught up in a separate controversy after urging Western nations to halt military assistance to Ukraine as it resists Russia's invasion. Her remarks, delivered at the Festival di Open in Parma, Italy, on September 19, implied that the continuing war serves a wider geopolitical goal of keeping Europe weakened.
