30 No. 76 JUSTICE Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian literature at Columbia University, published the following tribute to Albanese, which reflects thousands of comments on social media: “She is the voice of the global conscience speaking truth to the vulgar warmongers… [Her] bold, brilliant, and thoroughly researched report … has inspired much admiration around the globe… but also horror and fury among Zionists who do not want Israel’s genocide in Palestine to have such an eloquent, precise and detailed account.” She was, Dabashi said, taking on “genocidal Zionists” as well as those “fooled and deluded by the Israel lobby in the US, and by western media propaganda.”42 Dabashi grasps the baton of Albanese’s earlier antisemitic remarks and uses them to bolster her faux expertise. In truthful moments, Albanese reveals the strategy. She seeks not to defend international law, but to rewrite it while seizing control of its levers. “We cannot blame international law” for its shortcomings, she said, “because it’s colonial.” She continued that international law was like “a car, and in order to make it start … we need a key [and] the key is political will…. Many governments do not represent the will of … many of their citizens…. [The] key is not in the right hands, so we need to get hold of the key.”43 The “key,” is the genocide accusation itself, whether evidence supports it or not. Israel is a settler colonial genocidal state. It is necessarily guilty. As for the evidence, Albanese told her Princeton audience that “It doesn’t really matter whether a court has finished 42. Hamid Dabashi, “War on Gaza: Who’s Afraid of Francesca Albanese?” MIDDLE EAST EYE (April 10, 2024), available at https://www.middleeasteye.net/ opinion/war-gaza-whos-afraid-francesca-albanese 43. Supra note 37, at 32:30 and 101:13. 44. Supra note 36, at 10:18. 45. Supra note 37, at 38:54. investigating.”44 Or as she beamed at Erasmus, “Never before [have I] heard so much talking about settler colonialism” on the part of students. “Israel cannot run away,” she said, “without the sticker on [its] back of an apartheid state which has committed genocide.”45 It is the sticker, which would never come off, that matters. In this way Albanese and other “experts” have circled back to the genocide accusations leveled by the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s. Accusers at that time never dreamt that Israeli leaders would be found guilty in a court. The International Criminal Court did not even exist at the time. In essence, the PLO foreshadowed Mahmoud Mamdani’s statement to the effect that the accusation alone is what mattered. And as Francesca Albanese confirms, the real aim of the genocide accusation is to permanently destroy the legitimacy of the Jewish State.n Norman J.W. Goda is the Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida. He has authored, co-authored and edited ten books including Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (2006) and Outside Looking In: The World Universalizes the Holocaust (2026).
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