Take note: 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. First, Antisemitism was not coined to describe hatred of “Semitic peoples,” or of Middle Easterners whom Europeans regarded as foreign. When Wilhelm Marr introduced the term in 1879, he meant hostility to Jews, expressed it in the racial language of his time. “Semitic” denotes a family of languages. It does not make antisemitism a general category of prejudice that can be reassigned to other peoples. Second, the Nazis likewise targeted Jews as Jews. They did not begin, as Albanese suggests, with a broad campaign against “the non-white, the impure, the non-Christian” that later happened to “crystallize” into hatred of Jews. Her account takes a campaign of extermination directed at Jews and makes its victims sound interchangeable. Third, Albanese's claim about Jews being called “Muslims” as they were taken to the gas chambers is especially grotesque. Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, explained that Muselmann was camp slang for “the irreversibly exhausted, worn-out prisoner, close to death.” It described a prisoner’s condition. It did not mean the Nazis regarded Jews as Muslims, or sent them to the gas chambers under that identity. Indeed, Albanese’s theory cannot explain why Hitler welcomed and collaborated with Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. The two met in Berlin in 1941, and the Nazi regime financed the Mufti’s antisemitic broadcasts to Muslim audiences. The SS enlisted the Mufti to help recruit Bosnian Muslims into its Handschar division. Addressing the division’s imams, he called Nazi Germany their ally and identified “World Jewry” as a common enemy. That is the historical record Albanese’s theory cannot accommodate: Nazi leaders recruited Muslims to their cause while pursuing the extermination of Jews. Criticism of Israeli policy requires none of these falsehoods. Albanese first stretches antisemitism until it ceases to identify hatred of Jews, then claims that invoking it is a device to “silence debate.” Her argument depends on stripping the word of its meaning before dismissing those who use it. This is the same Francesca Albanese who wrote in an open letter to her family priest that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” Only when later confronted, she called her words “infelicitous, analytically inaccurate and unintendedly offensive.” Yet now she offers a definition under which antisemitism is no longer specifically hatred of Jews. How convenient. These remarks distorting the Holocaust and the meaning of Jew hatred are appalling from anyone. From a United Nations human rights mandate holder, they demand a public answer. We are calling on all UN member states to denounce Albanese’s distortion of antisemitism and the Holocaust. In particular, we are calling on the member nations of the Human Rights Council, including France, the Netherlands, Italy, Czechia, Estonia, Switzerland, Spain and the United Kingdom. The Council must not allow someone speaking under its authority to erase the identity of the Jews murdered by the Nazis.