Jos Collignon

Cartoonist since 1978, The Netherlands. @volkskrant since 1980, International Law, Univ. Utrecht. Unscrupulous liars are in power. Only good for cartoonists.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@vanranstmarc @FreddySack85974 @FranckenTheo Waarmee wij zijn beoordelingsvermogen nog niet weer serieus hoeven te nemen. Lijkt me.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@rory20s 😀😀

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@rory20s Ook geen lekkere maaltijd?

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@martoiu @jvanwensen Zucht….De Israellobby heeft nog steeds een dikke vinger in de pap bij de krant. Een Britse hulparts, terug uit Gaza, getuigt dat dagelijks specifieke dodelijke verwondingen binnenkwamen. Hij vermeld een dag met Palestijnse tieners die allemaal in de testikels waren geschoten.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@martoiu Jezelf in alle bochten wringen om maar niet van je malle geloof te hoeven vallen. Want, je fake god verhoede: wat zou je dan met je plotselinge lege en ineens mislukte leventje nog moeten?

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@maartenbakkerch Opgedirkte allang weerlegde onzinverhalen van N’yahu en z’n maasamoordenaars.

[Peter de Haan @Peter26061980]

Dus Markuszower - geboren Tel Aviv -, Yesilgos - geboren Ankara - en Ulysse Ellian - geboren Kabul - vinden het een grote ramp dat vluchtelingen uit het Midden Oosten naar Nederland komen.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@HenkToor @rory20s @volkskrant Trots op Jarl. Nieuwe ster in Volkskrant traditie.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@wol @ThomasErdbrink Beste Jeroen, het valt me op dat de mindset van Thomas tov Poetin’s Rusland echt dezelfde is als die waarmee jij heel erg lang Israel en zijn wandaden hebt benaderd. Spitting image, als je mij vraagt.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@claar51 @pauwendewit Trumptaal. 'many people tell me..' dan weet je gelijk zeker dat ie het zelf bij mekaar liegt.:))

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

Ai!

[Igor Sushko @igorsushko]

Russia

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

Ok. Een beetje dik aangezet. Ok, Grieks melodrama misschien. Maar terecht. Ze is het mikpunt van de haat. De haat van het tuig zonder compassie. Het tuig van rechts. Van ikke, ikke en de rest kan stikke. Op elk niveau.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE

There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"

Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!

And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that someone.

She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."

Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.

And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.

Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.

There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.

There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."

There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”

Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.

She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.

What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.

These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.

Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.

We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.

So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.

A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.

Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.

Let us stand with her.

Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.

[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@RPJ_Hendriks Niet D66 leeft van de asielproblematiek maar de VVD en alle tuig rechts daarvan. Daar wordt het 'probleem' opgeblazen, in eendrachtige samenwerking met de T. om de bange en kwaaie onnozele kiezer op te jutten en binnen te loodsen.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@Radlab72 Wonderlijk. Ze hebben nog steeds niet door dat het voor Jan (sic) en alleman in 2026 een aanbeveling is om door de isr. lobby trollen voor antisemiet te worden uitgekreten.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@DRoessen ok

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

Op weg naar de autocratie. De constitutie, waar ze zo trots op zijn, deugde al aantoonbaar van geen kant. Nu vervliegt ook de rechtspraak bij gebrek aan gewicht.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

This exchange between @SenBlumenthal and Trump’s judicial nominees is utterly astounding.

If you can watch this and still think this country isn’t falling into authoritarianism and fascism under Donald Trump, then you are not being honest with yourself.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

Banksy rules.

[Merajul Hasan @jusslaugh1]

@StateDept Asking about utility!! How Dumb is this You started all this don't forget!!

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@Radlab72 Doodzonde Jan. Ik snap het wel maar je was en bent richting gevend met je grote kennis van het geboefte alhier. Jammer, jammer.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

@DRoessen Dag Dion, daar heb ik, geloof ik, niets op tegen. Wat is dm?😀

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

For me is the best description of the Pimp I’ve ever read.

[Jos Collignon @CollignonJos]

Afvoeren in een strapsuit. Dit zegt alles. Over de GOP. En intussen ook over de US in z’n geheel.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

"Enemy from within." "Communists, Marxists, fascists, radical left thugs, vermin." "Garbage" Somalis, "low IQ people." "She's an evil, sick, crazy, b..."

Republicans want the left to tone down the rhetoric. Erm, have they listened to Donald Trump??

Zeteo put together a montage: