Instigating Murder

The US Attack on Francesca Albanese is even worse than meets the eye

Sometimes – or, actually, very often – the behavior of the West’s ruling “elites” (if that is the word) is so obviously absurd and vicious that it’s, literally, stunning. In the sense that it almost knocks out a sane and morally decent individual’s capacity to fully grasp all aspects of any given new piece of depravity.

Instead, if you are still halfway normal in this West ruled by the clearly criminal and perverse, their frequent peak performances in depravity leave you with a dazed sense of “What just happened, again?” And once you recover from that shock, you can’t entirely shake the eerie feeling that you’ll never quite catch up with “their” constant and, again literally, limitless production of new evils.

None of the above is abstract. On the contrary, concrete examples abound. Recently, for instance, we have witnessed Israeli genocider-in-chief and fugitive under international law Benjamin Netanyahu publicly nominate genocide co-perpetrator Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Together with his gang, the same Donald Trump, also of course serving as president of the still single most powerful (alas!) rogue state on the planet, has attempted to simply wipe out the memory of the Epstein sex abuse (at least) and political blackmail scandal. Most likely – as in, we all know it – because he himself and many of his donors were ensnared in that Israeli operation of controlling the West’s “elites” and depriving the West’s populations of the last, miserable shreds of having a say in their own countries.

Meanwhile, in Britain, those who resist the Gaza Genocide perpetrated by Israel and the West together are brutally suppressed as “terrorists,” while cabinet minister Lisa Nandy literally conspires with Israeli diplomats to make the already outrageously pro-Zionist BBC even more so.

And then, essentially at the same time, there has been America’s massive and unambiguously criminal attack on the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese. And that is, perhaps, the case displaying with greatest clarity that odd, stunning quality of the West’s atrocities and outrages.

The gist of the matter is that the US has sanctioned Albanese as if she were a criminal or even a terrorist. US secretary of state Marco Rubio has claimed that Albanese, an internationally recognized authority on human rights and international law, is waging a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel.” In particular, Rubio charged her with having supported the prosecution of Israeli leaders – that is, in reality, genocide perpetrators, also guilty of any other crime in every other book, from war crimes, via crimes against humanity, to apartheid and ethnic cleansing – by the International Criminal Court, another body under heavy sanctions fire from the US.

That, according to Rubio’s non-logic which is, of course, identical with that of the Israeli criminals – amounts to “antisemitism.” As a special highlight of absurdity, Rubio added that Albanese’s activities threaten the US’s “sovereignty.”

Let’s not waste time. No, it is neither necessary nor just nor intellectually healthy to treat these American allegations seriously, in the sense of going into any detail about why precisely they are deranged lies. Only so much, if Rubio and the other Trumpists are looking for someone destroying US “sovereignty” then the guy the American president has a habit of seating in his chair like a waiter may be a really good starting-point. And Netanyahu would, obviously, only be a small, nasty part of something much bigger called Israel and its lobby in America.

What is really happening here is clear: Albanese is a prominent critic and opponent of Israeli genocide. The US and its Western vassals are, at best, accomplices or, more realistically, co-perpetrators of that genocide. No Western state, conversely is fulfilling its clear legal obligations under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute (the US, to be fair, has always been vile enough not to even sign the latter; but that makes no difference to the fact that it is a signatory of the Genocide Convention): namely, not only not to commit the crime of genocide but to prevent it and to punish its perpetrators.

The US conclusion from the above, true to form is to persecute Albanese. It’s – literally – the criminals going after the sheriff. Because they can. For the worst and meanest rogue nation of them all, the US, with its trusty mass-murderous sidekick Israel, believes that might makes right. The rest – rules-based this or that, values, etc. – is pure hypocrisy.

None of the above is surprising or, make no mistake, new: No, this is not merely “Trumpism,” it is real-existing Americanism, as it has been for a long, long time. Ask the native Americans who were exterminated not “merely” by bloody violence but also by one broken agreement after another. Ask, more recently, the Iraqis or Libyans, for instance. What the Trumpists have added is merely a special note of in-your-face: Going after Albanese as if she were a terrorist while simultaneously not only sucking up once again to the genocidal führer of Israel but also a died-in-the-wool real terrorist, the head-cutting, pogrom-running puppet now in charge in Syria – that is almost a Gesamtkunstwerk of real-existing Americanism. Or maybe a Gestalt of evil and lies of satanic purity.

Likewise, the assault on Albanese – while a fresh peak performance – stands in a long tradition of harassing her as well as other opponents of Western-Israeli genocide, and not only in the US, of course. In Germany, Albanese was treated like a dangerous extremist who must not be allowed to speak in public. In the US, the attempt to cancel Albanese has a long history. Other critics of Israel and its crimes have been subjected to massive lawfare, on both sides of the Atlantic. Most recently, the German journalist Hüsein Dogru and his pregnant wife, too, have been terrorized by lawless EU sanctions that aim at nothing less than his economic destruction.

The reason: his reporting on protests against German complicity in the Gaza Genocide, which was absurdly re-interpreted as destabilizing Germany and – drum roll – playing into Russian hands. By that “logic” any criticism of any policy in the West can now lead to punitive sanctions (without any legal process, simply by bureaucratic fiat, Kafka-style) designed to destroy an individual’s existence.

All of the above, though, is obvious. Indeed, it is stunningly obvious in the sense mentioned at the beginning of this text: It arrests the mind, as it were. One gets stuck as if meditating on a perverse mandala of the unholy. Yet there seems to be one aspect of the attack on Albanese that receives too little attention, although it is second to none in its viciousness.

Consider that the Israelis have a long history of not “merely” smearing and undermining the UN, its offices, and representatives, but of deliberately mass-murdering them, too. To his eternal shame, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has betrayed his own brave staff by never daring to say what the world knows: The hundreds of UN, in particular UNRWA, personnel killed in Gaza since October 2023 have been the victims of an Israeli campaign to destroy UNRWA as a last lifeline for the Palestinian victims. A campaign that is part of Israel’s use of starvation as yet another weapon of genocide. Its “logical” conclusion has been the replacement of UNRWA with the mercenary death squads, cooperating with the equally murderous IDF, of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, funded, of course, by Israel.

If hundreds of UN staff have been mass-murdered as part of Israel’s Gaza Genocide, let’s not forget that Israel has a long tradition of assassinating UN officers, indeed, including the very highest: In 1948, Folke Bernadotte, a mediator and emissary of the UN Security Council was murdered by the Lehi terrorist organization (aka Stern Gang). Its members received a general amnesty in 1949. Later, one of Lehi’s leaders would go on to become Israeli prime minister (another one, of course, had led Irgun, another Zionist terror organization), and a military decoration would be named after it as well.

Israel, in sum, has a proud tradition of murdering UN representatives. It also has a long tradition of impunity in this area – as in all others – of criminality as well. Against this background, it is impossible that Rubio, Trump, and other US officials have missed one simple fact: They have not only assaulted Albanese with criminal lawfare. They have also signaled to Israel that they won’t mind if Israeli criminals go a step further and murder this UN representative, too.

That is the stark reality: Albanese’s punishment for standing up against genocide is not “merely” massive harassment but a very real death threat. Or to be precise, an implicit encouragement for Israel, a murderous state founded by ethnic cleansers and terrorists, to make true on the death threat Albanese lives under already. And Trump and his henchmen know this.