Hicham

Marketing Manager? Managing Marketeer?.. Spartacus! Co-founder @24Halal

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

Her story needs to be taught just like Anne Franks was

[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]

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

There is no annexation “by law,” it’s literally illegal. The words you’re looking for are land theft and occupation.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

If Evil could tweet, this is what it would!

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Israel killed two UNICEF drivers trying to get WATER to families in Gaza. Is this story going to get any coverage?

Or is the ongoing genocide not newsworthy?

[jeremy scahill @jeremyscahill]

🚨 Prominent Journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin Has Been in Jail for Six Weeks in Kuwait, Faces Trial in Special Tribunal

https://t.co/6u8QeUpMUU

[Sjamadriaan @zeg_eens_aad]

Schandalig hoe die Palestijnse kinderen zich laten mishandelen in Israëlische gevangenissen en zo antisemitisme aanwakkeren

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

“Girl student”

No one writes like this @Reuters.

[Mathieu von Rohr @mathieuvonrohr]

I can’t watch this. It causes me physical pain.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

These two men helped Trump and Vance get elected. I’m glad they’re saying what they’re saying now but I wish they would own that.

[Marina Purkiss @MarinaPurkiss]

WHAT IS THIS HEADLINE @BBCWorld???

Israel attacked civilian areas

Just say

ISRAEL ATTACKED CIVILIAN AREAS

…AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN

[Marc Botenga MEP @BotengaM]

EU Council President Costa asks Iran to stop attacking countries and engage in diplomacy.

The US and Israel, which started the war and killed the negotiations, go unmentioned. He cannot even bring himself to condemn the US killing of schoolgirls in Minab.

EU credibility, RIP.

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

Experiencing perhaps the worst and most terrorizing Israeli war on Lebanon has been really hard.

The one thing that gives me comfort in these tough times is Europe’s “deep concern.”

It soothes us all amidst the buzzing of Israeli drones and the thunderous pounding of their airstrikes. I’m sure Palestinians feel the same relief.

Thank you Europe, your deep concern is a real game changer.

[Claudio Francavilla @ClaFrancavilla]

Who needs sanctions when you can have deep concerns?

[Chay Bowes @BowesChay]

A stressed NATO Chief, Mark Rutte, tells the US media that he supports the US / Israeli war on Iran

Meanwhile, NATO member states like Türkiye call it "Zionist terrorism" Spain, France, Italy and Germany say its "Not their War"

Who does this failed Dutch politician work for?

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

Why is Israel’s completely illegal invasion of Lebanon entirely absent from Western media?

Why has Israel not been booted out of the UN?

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

'The Voice of Hind Rajab' didn't win an Oscar tonight.

Here's a reminder of the smear campaign it faced in Hollywood:
https://t.co/0iWHBP3fzT

[JEFF @jeffisrael25]

let me get this straight

a team will not be playing in the FIFA World Cup because they are currently being bombed by the FIFA Peace Prize winner

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

"Jews don't belong in American society."

Imagine a sitting member of Congress tweeting that. You can't. Thankfully, it'd never happen. And *if* it did, it'd be the end of their career and the biggest story in America.

But Ogles can say this about Muslims without any censure.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

We've reached a point where Israeli attacks on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and now Iran have become so normalized they are reported in western media as if they are part of the natural order of the universe.