Though the headline of a hagiographic profile of Francesca Albanese published at British Vogue on April 30, “Francesca Albanese Wants The World To Wake Up”, is a reference to her new book’s putative insight into injustices against Palestinians, her well-documented record of hateful rhetoric suggests what she wants “the world to wake up” to is the threat posed by Jews and Israel.
The piece, by Kerry McDermott, about the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and her new book When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine, only refers to antisemitism as an unserious charge against Albanese leveled by “Israel’s most vociferous defenders”.
Yet, her rhetoric and social media content includes the endorsement and defense of anti-Semites, terrorists and Holocaust deniers, the use of anti-Jewish tropes, Hamas rape denial, and rhetoric defending the Palestinian perpetrators of the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust.
The examples are too numerous to cite in full, but here are some what the British Vogue journalist could have easily found about Albanese, who is characterised as someone whose work is grounded in a “diligent application of the facts”.
In 2014, Albanese claimed that the U.S. is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby”, Europe is “subjugated by… the sense of guilt about the Holocaust,” and that indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas are “the only means [Palestinians] have” to “defend themselves.”
In 2022, Albanese characterised John Mearsheimer as “an authority on antisemitism“, the same Mearsheimer who recently opined that Israel controls the United States, and who blurbed a book by Nazi-apologist and and all-around Jew-hater Gilad Atzmon.
Also in 2022, she defended the charge that the Jewish lobby controls the media, said that the BBC “has the Israel lobby in its veins”, and openly justified terrorism, stating that “The Palestinians have no other room for dissent [other] than violence”.
In fact, that year, she stated on two separate occasions that Hamas has the right to armed resistance.
On October 7 2023, the day that Hamas engaged in the barbaric orgy of mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation in southern Israel, Albanese’s reaction was to minimize Hamas’ atrocities stating that, “Today’s violence must be put in context”. A month later she said that Israel has no right, under international law, to self-defense against Hamas.
In 2024, she claimed that antisemitism didn’t exist in Gaza, that Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre wasn’t motivated by antisemitism, and later suggested that the media’s narrative that the terror group murdered civilians on that day can’t be confirmed.
Also that year, she engaged in a Holocaust inversion by comparing Adolf Hitler with Benjamin Netanyahu, and likened the systematic extermination of Jews under the Nazi’s “pure race” policy to Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza.
Albanese – again, in 2024 – retweeted with the caption “A must-read for the ages…” an article from Chris Hedges that read: “I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to swell”.
That year, she also cruelly claimed that there was no evidence that Hamas raped Israeli women, girls and men.
Yet, while denying the rape of Jewish women and girls, she promoted the truly demented lie being circulated within extremist circles that Israel has used trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.
In Feb. 2026, she characterised Israel as “the common enemy of humanity”.
In addition to covering for Albanese’s record of antisemitism, terror support and rape denial, the British Vogue journalist herself engages in a form of Oct. 7 revisionism by by framing Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks as “staggering violence unleashed” by the IDF, and the terrorist invasion of southern Israel that day as merely a “deadly attack”.
British Vogue readers are told that 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since Oct. 7, that “90 per cent of homes have been damaged or destroyed”, while “more than 2 million people remain displaced”. But, the journalist is silent about the 1,200 Israelis murdered, and the scores who were raped, brutalized, tortured, displaced and taken hostage.
In fact, the word “Hamas” isn’t used once in the article.
The media’s broader whitewashing, obfuscation and inversion, over the last two and a half years, of Hamas’ barbaric pogrom that we’ve documented is a dynamic that’s been characterised by Balas Berkowitz as the rendering of Oct. 7th as a “non-event”.
British Vogue shows its hand again when, further into the article, we’re told that “Elsewhere in the region, an estimated 3 million Iranians and more than a million people in Lebanon have been displaced in the wake of the war launched by the US and Israel on Iran last month”.
This of course erases both Hezbollah, whose decision, on March 2, to attack Israel reignited the war in Lebanon, and the actions of the Iranian regime, which, in addition to sponsoring terror proxies in the region like Hezbollah, murdered tens of thousands of non-violent protesters beginning in late Dec. 2025, from the story.
Finally, the celebratory coverage and whitewashing of Albanese isn’t a one-off for Vogue UK. In Sept. 2020, the magazine chose to feature, in a special edition on the top 20 progressive anti-racist activists, Tamika Mallory, despite the fact that she was an enthusiastic supporter of Louis Farrakhan, one of the most notorious anti-Semites in the US.
Evidently, British Vogue – like other publications which claim the mantle of progressive opposition to all forms of bigotry – has an glaring blind spot when it comes to racism targeting Jews.
