The rules were very clear. No recordings of any kind were permitted. There would not be a traditional Q&A; rather, participants could scan two QR codes, one for the first half of the day and one for the second half, which would lead participants to a page where they could submit questions for review.
Alireza Doostdar, one of the organizers, took the stage first to introduce the proceedings. Doostdar is perhaps the most active and influential member of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UChicago, an organization that acted as a vocal proponent of the encampments despite the fact that some of the students who built the encampments supported Hamas. In his work as an associate professor, he had adopted a tone of veneration when talking about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of Iran and a mass murderer who had assassinated thousands of political opponents. It was my first instance of discomfort at needing to join in clapping for a speaker.
Of course, Doostdar remained far from the most illustrious anti-Semitic figure at the event. The featured guest, the most controversial speaker, and with the biggest title, was Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur to the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Albanese’s speech reminded me less of the elevated scholasticism present in most of my tenure at UChicago than of the outpourings of the veteran in this video:
The connection between this video and the speech of someone appointed by the UN may not be readily apparent, but it will be shown in due course.
Albanese began her speech with a tacit invitation to immediately adopt her perspective on the situation in Gaza without any forethought. “It would be ridiculous not to talk about the 18,000 … children killed by the Israeli army since Oct 7,” Albanese began, saying also “self-defense does not justify genocide.” Albanese regularly assumed a presumptive stance regarding genocide concerning Gaza, even going so far as to say that discussion over whether genocide was actually happening should be elided. “States party to the genocide convention have three obligations: to prevent, to stop, [and] to punish. [The] moment member states might be committed the duty to prevent kicks in. Discussion doesn’t matter.”
Again and again, Albanese referred to the “Palestinian genocide” without any acknowledgment of doubt concerning the matter or of alternate perspectives.
Perhaps this would not have smacked of propagandistic vitriol quite so much were it not for the fact that many other speakers during the forum—including Albanese herself—had stressed repeatedly that the definition of genocide is quite narrow, and that proving that any given event is genocide is quite difficult. It is far easier to convict military actors of war crimes or crimes against humanity than genocide for that reason. Yet, Albanese made her assertions uncontested, and when an audience member raised the question of whether Hamas could be considered to have taken genocidal action, the answer from all the panelists was that its actions must be considered war crimes and crimes against humanity, not genocide.
One of the more disturbing aspects of Albanese’s speech was her persistent attempts to discredit the legitimate Jewish claim to Israel and her minimization of Jewish and Israeli suffering.
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In a country where most millennials and Gen Zers do not possess a baseline understanding of the facts of the Holocaust, stopping a speech to point out that the Holocaust was “not just Jews” strikes me as extremely problematic. The factuality of the statement does not mitigate its harm in confusing a young public who are largely unable to correctly state the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, or the fact that Albanese was using these words to cast the “Palestinian genocide” as uncontested in a way that the Jewish legacy of the Holocaust was not. Her statement underscored the fact that, despite the promise in the program description, not one of the speakers—even the speaker whose specialty was the Holocaust—actually focused on that genocide in Europe for their speech. This also despite the fact that the word “genocide” itself was coined by a Jewish Holocaust survivor, in large part as a way of describing the unprecedented crime the Holocaust represented.
Albanese mentioned that the victims were “not just Jews” again about October 7. She mentioned foreign nationals as victims—of which there were 79 out of the over 1,200 killed—and also Palestinian nationals, though I could find no evidence of any Palestinians being victims of Hamas on that date. Perhaps she meant the militants were victims. Perhaps the fact that this terrorist attack was the deadliest since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 in terms of Israeli victims was something that needed to be undermined, even by bending the facts. In any case, delegitimizing the Jewish suffering of the Holocaust and October 7 certainly worked well within the larger picture Albanese attempted to paint.
This picture framed the “Palestinian genocide” as “the most seen, and the most supported by Western countries.” A genocide perpetrated by a “den of support” with complicit member states who use “the banking sector, universities” and the “tech [industry]” to “turn … from the infrastructure of occupation to [the] infrastructure of genocide.” According to Albanese, Israel had used October 7 to “accelerate [its] power,” using the terrorist attack as a pretense to ramp up the genocide against the Palestinian people, as they had been engaging in genocidal acts before Oct 7 as well. Listening to her, I felt as if she insinuated that Israel had been the puppeteers of even October 7, leaving nothing to be sacrificed in their pursuit of the ravishing of the Palestinians.
It was in this respect that Albanese, even with her fancy UN title, resembled the poor misguided veteran in the Charlie Kirk video, spouting lies about how the Talmud encouraged rape of thre-year olds and that Jews were a false people, created in 1948. The idea that Western countries, that American industry itself, that the entire university system, is “complicit” in the genocide of the Palestinian people strikes me as a thinly veiled revival of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion supplemented by an air of indefagitable victimhood.
In fact, Albanese, along with so many Palestinian activists and professors, remains thoroughly supported by the powerful institutions of higher education. Unlike some anti-Semites on the right just emerging from the far corners of the internet, Albanese, and the panelists that accompanied her, were brandishing their ideology in full view of one of the top universities in the country at an event open to the entire student body, faculty, staff, and the alumni community. One of the speakers even remarked on the angels carved into the roof, to the effect that the proceedings had been blessed. Such a remark underscored, for me, the ultimate ingratitude, the hypocrisy, of a politician who would make accusations at the very institution, and the larger network of institutions, that extend their blessing to pro-Palestinian activists.
Perhaps this is the most significant difference between the veteran in the Charlie Kirk video and Francesca Albanese: the veteran had Charlie Kirk to refute his diatribe, whereas Albanese only had acolytes to encourage her fantasies. I tried to voice that refutation–but the moderators screened out my questions. However, by detailing Albanese’s attempts at misinformation, truth distortion, and scape-goating, maybe the Charlie Kirks of the world will arise, shake their head with a laugh, and give those standing in the wings the real story, so that what genocide really is, and the facts of when it has occurred, will be preserved.
Picture taken by the author from outside the forum
