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Lynn Keefe
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Francesca Albanese is the most outstanding person of integrity and courage of our time.
She will forever be my hero and mentor.
#FreePalestine
@FranceskAlbs
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]
![yanisvaroufakis's tweet photo. 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]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HHsnlr9WIAEr4Cw.jpg)
The EU is currently supporting the most well-documented genocide in human history.
Israel continues to block international journalists from Gaza, despite a "ceasefire".
Israel ignores its own Supreme Court's ruling to allow Red Cross visits to prisons – deemed "torture camps" by Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
Does Israel have something to hide?
UPDATE: Senator McConnell is now recuperating quickly and seeing visitors.
(except Scott Jennings)
Who to follow
sama
@sulei1
life is an adventure
Greg @infotrekcalgary🦋 🇨🇦🌻🇺🇦 born@323ppmCO2
@InfoTrekCalgary
Candidate for PM of Canada. May also instruct math, science, computer apps, social studies as needed. Academic but not rt now. So much to learn, so little time.
Dusty Ferguson
@dustyferg
Canadian 🇨🇦 Mom and Nana. Wear a damn mask!!
American media and politicians claim that new legislation does NOT merge the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Meanwhile Netanyahu, who has taken credit for proposing the measure, clearly says it does:
“Will that drawing down of foreign aid be compensated by the proposal to have a merging of some sort between our Pentagon and your military?"
"Yeah, I'm calling it, 'From aid to partnership.’”
He then lays out what it would look like:
The Pentagon merging with the IDF, & they call us antisemitic for saying jews control America?
Neither Carney nor Poilievre are able to challenge the Zionist oligarchy. Only the NDP's Avi Lewis stands up to the foreign-lobbies who control Parliament.
A dear medical colleague and friend working in Gaza currently sent this photo to me. Canada is sending fortified biscuits into Gaza, but also still sending weapons to Israel to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Don’t be fooled by Canada’s “humanitarian alibi”.
A Palestinian farmer arrived at his greenhouse near the town of Beit Furik in the occupied West Bank this morning, only to find it had been partially damaged by Israeli settlers.
#Israeliwarcrimes #غزة
#FIFAWorldCup
#GazaStarving
#WorldCup
Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine walk Dublin’s Grafton Street with a huge handcrafted banner to demand Dr Hussam Abu Safiya’s release
The vast majority of decennt humanity will reach a tipping point with Israeli barbarity... It will not be pretty.
A life that should have been ordinary was taken from him by the genocide.
For the past three years, Karam , my lion, has not known a single day of safety.
The immediate release of Abu Safiya and Al-Hams, who are civilian doctors with protected status under international humanitarian law, is a top legal obligation that must be fulfilled and cannot be overlooked
https://t.co/KqiFtrjGPQ
One-and-a-half-year-old Essam Al-Nabih weighs just 5 kilograms and is fighting for his life after suffering severe malnutrition and hydrocephalus, a condition caused by fluid buildup in the brain.
Born during Israel's genocide at a normal weight, his health deteriorated after his mother’s malnutrition and the collapse of living conditions in Gaza left her unable to breastfeed him.
Doctors have approved an urgent medical referral for treatment outside Gaza, but Essam remains trapped as Israeli restrictions on the movement of people and the closure of crossings prevent him from accessing specialised care.
His family says doctors have warned that his chances of survival are now extremely slim and are calling on international organisations to intervene before it is too late.
Breaking: An Israeli airstrike has targeted a residential block in central western Gaza City.
@EnergyEnginee11 @LionsOfZion_ORG Supporting human rights and being against Israelis killing Palestinian babies is not hate, it's humanity.
Your hateful hasbara is no longer working.
@LionsOfZion_ORG Calling Israel, A Jewish state is antisemitic
Arrested in Spain, to be extradited to the US??? Isn't Spain supposed to be the *good* European country? The global complicity in Israel's genocide is truly sickening.
ליאל חצרוני ז״ל נשרפה למוות עם אחיה התאום, הדודה שגידלה אותה, ועוד 4 חטופים על ידי חיילי צה״ל תחת פיקודו של תא״ל ברק חירם, ואז הגיע מפקד היחצ״א אל״מ גולן ואך שטייח את רציחתם וטען מול מצלמות מכל העולם שהוא במו ידיו הוציא מהבית של פסי כהן גופות שרופות של 8 תינוקות שלא היו ולא נבראו
Israel to grant millions to settler group sanctioned by U.K., France and Canada https://t.co/AT3Y5vWQKt
Trying to get some answers from the chair of FIFA disciplinary Cttee Mohammad Alkamali about the decision-making process which led to US striker Folarin Balogun avoiding a ban after being sent off, following an intervention from US President Donald Trump
https://t.co/rTpCJqzLyo
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