Antonio Guterres
Antonio GuterresREUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese a "horrible person" privately to Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt.

Lipstadt revealed the Secretary-General's criticism of Albanese during her final roundtable with Jewish news organizations yesterday (Tuesday), Jewish Insider reported. The Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism spoke to Gutteres about Albanese's behavior during an event at a synagogue during the Munich Security Conference. According to her, Guterres said twice about Albanese, "She's a horrible person."

A spokesperson for Guterres would not confirm or deny that he made the comments, The Forward reported. The spokesperson noted that the Secretary-General does not have authority over the UN's Special Rapporteurs.

When asked if she believes the incoming Trump Administration is up to the challenge of dealing with the wave of antisemitism that has swept the globe since the October 7 massacre, Lipstadt responded, “I certainly hope so — I don’t know." She added that she hopes that the person President-elect Donald Trump nominates to succeed her will be “someone who will be a barn-builder, not a barn-burner."

Lipstadt stated that Trump's nominee for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose Senate confirmation is being held today, “takes this issue very seriously” and “gets it 100%" on the seriousness of antisemitism.

Francesca Albanese has frequently drawn accusations of antisemitism for the extreme nature of her statements against Israel, including comparisons between Israel and Israeli leaders and the Nazis and Hitler, accusations that Israel is committing genocide, and denial of Israel's right to self-defense against the Hamas terrorist organization.

This week, human rights expert Professor Anne Bayefsky, the Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of the Human Rights Voices human rights organization, told Arutz Sheva - Israel National News that "the UN's Francesca Albanese is known worldwide to the victims of antisemitism as a leading propagandist, to the 21st century what the Nazi's Joseph Goebbels was to the 20th century."

Albanese also appeared to draw a connection between the devastating Los Angeles wildfires and the ongoing conflict in Gaza, The Jewish Chronicle reported on Monday.

Albanese drew attention after amplifying a post on X that described the fires and the war in Gaza as "symptoms of the same disease."

The post, shared by Mondoweiss, a progressive, anti-Zionist news outlet based in New York, stated, “The fires burning in Palestine and Los Angeles today are symptoms of the same disease: a system that values conquest over conservation, profit over people, and expansion over existence.”

Albanese’s anti-Israel bias was first exposed in 2022, in the form of antisemitic posts she made on social media, in which she claimed that the “Jewish lobby” controls the US.

At the time, Albanese rejected arguments that the comments about the “Jewish lobby” were antisemitic and claimed they were “mischaracterized”.

Since the Hamas massacre on October 7, she has condemned Israel for defending itself and gone as far as to claim that Israel has no right to defend itself.

Later, Albanese denied that the Hamas massacre in southern Israel on October 7 was antisemitic.

This past July, she endorsed a social media post comparing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Israel’s Foreign Ministry fired back, slamming her on X as being “beyond redemption.”

In August, the UN rapporteur accused Israel of “genocide” after the IDF struck a Hamas command center which was embedded inside a mosque in the Al-Taba’een school compound.

In November, Albanese told British journalist Piers Morgan in an interview that the nature of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza following the October 7 attack was illegal.