The Progressive Myth of Francesca Albanese

Fiamma Nirenstein

United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese is not a scholar. She’s not an expert. She’s not even an honest broker. What she is — and what she has always been — is a progressive denialist with a platform.

Her reports on the Middle East are stitched together entirely from the talking points of her favorite NGOs, many of them openly aligned with Hamas. Her sources? The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. The Palestinian Authority’s WAFA news agency. A tight network of “human rights” organizations with long histories of anti-Israel bias.

She doesn’t cite history because she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t report on facts because they get in the way of her narrative. And when it comes to Jews, her worldview is disturbingly familiar: money, power, influence, lobbies, racism. That’s all she sees. That’s all she says.

Albanese’s rhetoric is nothing new. What is new is how many mainstream talk shows, media outlets — both in Italy and abroad — are now echoing her worldview without question. And when her ideological allies commit unimaginable atrocities, she doesn’t condemn them. She doubts. She delays. She stays silent. Because if she acknowledged them, she could no longer see herself as a “decent” person.

And that’s the game. JNS columnist Melanie Phillips has written extensively about this phenomenon: the “decent progressive” who loves humanity but cannot deal with Jewish self-defense. For that person, Oct. 7, 2023, simply doesn’t exist. It’s not in Albanese’s reports. It’s not in her statements. It’s nowhere in her moral calculus.

For decades, the side Albanese represents has rejected every serious negotiated solution, starting in 1948. She likely doesn’t know this. She shouts, “From the river to the sea,” oblivious — or indifferent — to the genocidal implications. She questions Israel’s right to exist, even as she wraps herself in the false language of international law.

Her idea of legality is fraudulent, but she markets it well. And she finds plenty of applause, fueled by petrodollars and progressive guilt. Her argument boils down to this: “I’m anti-colonial, you’re right-wing. I’m morally righteous, you’re not.” Even if her “colonial occupier” is the only indigenous people still living on their ancestral land.

None of it matters to the activist cloaked as an expert. Albanese has caught the crest of a cultural wave — the woke movement, now transformed into a global campaign of legitimized incitement against Israel.

Naturally, her supporters think she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. It fits the pattern: when communism was murdering millions, Dario Fo was handed the same award. So why not Albanese?

She’s everywhere: the U.N.’s chosen envoy, the star of the Bogotá conference alongside 30 nations including China, Qatar, South Africa, and Spain. In Italy, she’s suddenly become a symbol. The mayor of Bari wants to give her the keys to the city. A Florence councilman has proposed granting her honorary citizenship. And the leadership of Italy’s left praises her “right to speak.”

But let’s be clear: defending her isn’t about speech. It’s about giving her a platform without scrutiny. It’s about silencing dissent, not defending debate.

This is a woman who has attended Hamas-linked events, made antisemitic statements, been implicated in academic dishonesty, and raised serious ethical red flags. Yet the U.N. embraced her anyway.

Why? Because Albanese is not the problem. She’s the symptom. Behind her is the larger cultural mutation: the transformation of the “good person” into an ideologue who worships the oppressed, romanticizes the Third World, and demonizes Israel as a symbol of Western sin.

In this worldview, the Jewish people don’t count as indigenous, even if they’re the only ancient people to have never left their homeland entirely. The Holocaust survivors who built farms in the Negev? The Jews from Arab lands who fled persecution and made the desert bloom? Irrelevant.

Albanese’s “progressive” morality cannot process Jewish self-defense — only Jewish victimhood. That’s why when Israel withdraws from Gaza, hands over land, evacuates settlements, and pursues peace deals — ten times, by the way — she still doesn’t know. Because she’s not here to know. She’s here to repeat: “We are the right side of history.”

So what does the “good progressive” say to themselves when, on Oct. 7, Palestinian terrorists burned babies alive and raped women?

They say nothing. Because in Albanese’s world, it never happened.

Greta Thunberg refused to watch the film of the Nova massacre. In San Francisco, they topple Columbus, vandalize Churchill and Lincoln, and call it justice. They erase the past and ignore the present.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to live under siege from rockets, suicide bombings, and terrorist attacks that have killed tens of thousands over 75 years.

But this time, after Oct. 7, Israel knows: its enemies do not want peace. They want destruction. And Israel will not surrender.

That reality breaks the progressive script. It shatters the fantasy of a clean, happy, virtuous peace — one that, if we’re honest, only works if the Jewish state doesn’t survive.

Too bad, Ma’am. Israel is not playing along.

Dr. Fiamma Nirenstein is an Italian-Israeli journalist, author and senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. An adviser on antisemitism to Israel’s foreign minister, she previously served in the Italian Parliament as vice president of the Foreign Affairs Committee.