Lipstadt: U.N.’s Guterres said U.N. Special Rapporteur Albanese is ‘a horrible person’
The U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism also spoke about her hopes for the Trump administration’s efforts to fight antisemitism during a roundtable with reporters

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Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, speaks during 'March For Israel' at the National Mall on November 14, 2023 in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, told reporters at a roundtable on Tuesday — her last before departing her role — that U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres had condemned Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the situation on human rights in the Palestinian territories, who the U.S. has repeatedly criticized for antisemitic comments, in a one-on-one conversation with her.
Lipstadt also spoke about her hopes for the Trump administration’s efforts to fight antisemitism, internal issues among some State Department staff relating to her office’s mission, China’s role as a driver of global antisemitism and her most important accomplishments in office.
The outgoing envoy said that, during an event at a synagogue during the Munich Security Conference, she had spoken to Guterres about the U.S. government’s concerns with Albanese. In Lipstadt’s retelling, Guterres responded, twice, “She’s a horrible person.”
U.S. lawmakers have repeatedly pressed Guterres and the U.N. to dismiss Albanese, whose position is unpaid, but those calls have gone unanswered.
Lipstadt declined to comment on some of the controversial names, such as Shmuley Boteach, Alan Dershowitz and Dov Hikind, who’ve been floated to replace her, but said that she hopes President-elect Donald Trump will nominate “someone who will be a barn-builder, not a barn-burner,” and can build on the progress she has made.
“I would hope it would be someone who would command the respect and the attention of the foreign governments with which they’ll be dealing,” she continued. Lipstadt said she “certainly hope[s]” that the incoming administration is up to the task of combating the global surge in antisemitism.
She said that, based on conversations with Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio during her confirmation process, she is confident that the Florida senator “takes this issue very seriously” and “gets it 100%, just as Secretary [Tony] Blinken got it, so that gives me direct hope on this issue.”
Lipstadt said she’d be willing to offer advice to the Trump team or her eventual replacement if they ask, explaining that refusing to do so “would be a dereliction of duty and everything I’ve said.”
Since the Oct. 7 attacks, several mid-level State Department staffers have publicly resigned in protest of the U.S.’ support for Israel. While Lipstadt said that the issue had not impacted the senior policy-making levels of the State Department, some individual mid-level staff had expressed issues with her office’s work because they did not understand that combating antisemitism and support for Israel are separate issues.
“For some of them, I think it spilled over into thinking, ‘Well, if they fight antisemitism, they must support Israel 120%,’ or something like that,” she said. “It wasn’t resistance to the work that we’re doing but I think there were some people, misinformed people, who thought [they knew] what our particular views were without ever asking us.”
Lipstadt said that State Department officials also still had yet to identify who scrawled a swastika inside an elevator in the State Department headquarters several years ago.
She also noted that China has been a significant driver of global antisemitism in recent years, which she described as a form of “utilitarian” antisemitism, employed for political gain, rather than ideological reasons.
“It seems to have been … a way of signaling that ‘We are with the global south. We’re with you and not with them,’” Lipstadt said.
She said that such discussions have made a particularly strong impression on foreign officials with whom she has met, and helped some better understand the nature and importance of combating antisemitism.
U.S. intelligence and security agencies are “very aware” of the Chinese government’s amplification of antisemitism and the “global implications” of that, she added.
Reflecting on the rise of antisemitism since Oct. 7, Lipstadt said she believes that the organized Jewish community overlooked and underestimated the extent to which anti-Israel and pro-Hamas groups had built up support on college campuses. She said she’s “glad the organizations are re-assessing” and are adapting to the new landscape.
She also emphasized that antisemitism is now impacting individual Jews’ “personal lives in a way that we haven’t seen since the ‘50s and early ‘60s.”
The spike, she said, has brought antisemitism issues “into sharper focus than I ever imagined,” and the global landscape has “changed tremendously,” with antisemites becoming more emboldened and brazen.
She noted that it’s been “frustrating at times” to be restricted, because of her international remit, in her ability to address domestic antisemitism on college campuses, where she spent most of her career before the State Department.
Lipstadt did say she was struck by how “heated and extreme” rhetoric on college campuses became, including overt support for terrorism and denial of Hamas’s atrocities, “in a way that I had never seen before in relation to other kinds of tragedies.” She said that “struck me as something really significant.”
Lipstadt said that one of her early goals in office was making progress on fighting antisemitism in Gulf states, and convincing them to separate the issue from geopolitical issues with Israel. Her first foreign trip in her role was to Saudi Arabia to pursue this goal.
She said those efforts were stalled as a result of the Oct. 7 attack, but said she hopes that the next administration is able to advance them.
“I think that could have a very big impact in terms of the power of those countries, the importance of those countries, but also in terms of antisemitism within the Muslim world, the Arab world,” Lipstadt said.
Lipstadt said she believes she has helped raise the prominence of antisemitism as a foreign policy concern issue both within the State Department and with partner governments abroad, even in countries without substantial Jewish populations.
One key signal of this, she said, is that the State Department distributed the global guidelines for combating antisemitism, which the U.S. and other partners developed, as a démarche to a range of U.S. partners, formally asking other nations to sign express their support for the guidelines and making them a formal part of the State Department’s global human rights agenda.
Lipstadt said another major success was overhauling the structure of the office, which had just two full time and one part-time permanent staff members when the Trump administration left office and effectively shut down in the transition period between presidential administrations.
Now, the office will have approximately 20 full-time non-political staff who will continue on into the Trump administration and will be able to keep the office’s work moving ahead even before a new special envoy is nominated or a deputy special envoy is appointed.
Those staff, she said, will continue to work on recruiting additional countries to sign the global guidelines, participate in international conferences and continue to advise other State Department personnel and policymakers on antisemitism.
Lipstadt, who was a frequent social media user in her pre-government life — a fact that caused issues with some Republicans during her confirmation process — said she’s still deciding how best to speak out in her post-government life.
She said that she’s also found, in government life, that not speaking out, or acting quietly, can be more effective in the long-run than public condemnations.
“I’ll have to decide,” she said. “Also, if you speak too much on everything, at some point you’ll just be dismissed as a partisan hack.”