Anti-Semitic Conference To Be Held In Campus Building Named For Portland’s First Jewish Female Mayor

The organizers of an upcoming Palestinian-rights conference either pulled a big boner or are crazy like a fox.

The Maine Coalition for Palestine is holding a daylong seminar February 28 featuring an anti-Semitic speaker, Francesca Albanese.

Ironically, the conference will be held in a building named for Linda Abromson, who in 1982 was elected as the first female Jewish mayor in Maine’s largest city.

Abromson, who died in 2017, was also a Jewish activist, serving on the boards of the Jewish Federation, National Council of Jewish Women and Temple Beth El in Portland.

Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, called Israel the “common enemy of humanity” at a recent Qatar forum featuring Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.

The controversial all-day Portland conference titled “The Consequence of Palestine” will be held at the Abromson Community Education Center.

The event is sponsored by the University of Southern Maine along with the Maine Coalition for Palestine and Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights.

Joel Abromson, the ex mayor’s husband and for whom the education center is also named, was a longtime state senator and human-rights promoter.

The Abromsons are members of the Maine Jewish Museum Hall of Fame.

Jewish groups are up in arms that a publicly funded university would sponsor a conference featuring a rapidly anti-semitic speaker.

But Albanese denies such a profile.

When a number of international human-rights groups protested her comments, Albanese’s office claimed “her statement was misquoted or taken out of context, though full video of her remarks remained subject to interpretive dispute,” according to JewishOnliner.org.

The conference is designed to see Palestine “in a global context where international law, human rights, and truth are the casualties of violent state power and media narrative control,” according to Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights.

As part of her position as a UN special rapporteur, Albanese has been critical of Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian territories.

She recommended in her first report that UN member states develop a plan to end the occupation and apartheid.

After the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, Albanese called for an immediate ceasefire and warned that Palestinians in Gaza were at risk of ethnic cleansing.

Two years ago Albanese reported to the UN Human Rights Council that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide.

Pro-Israel organizations, including the U.S. government, have accused Albanese of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, and have called for her removal.