Les Monaghan

[Les Monaghan @LesMonaghan]

Thank you @ace_thenorth @jomillerdonny @castindoncaster @frenchgate #doncasterisgreat https://t.co/AHbSSaRHxc

[Les Monaghan @LesMonaghan]

THREAD:

[Peter Mitchell @_bezpilotnik]

When you lose a loved one to a violent crime you get to find out that everyone absolutely loves a murder: orgies of speculation, salaciousness, pornographic reimaginings, schadenfreude, cheap sentiment and cheaper pieties, ass-coverings that only compound the offence; /

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel executed Theodosia today in Qlayaa, South Lebanon.

She was on her way to take her exams.

Israel dropped a bomb on her car, killing her and her parents.

[Marl Karx @BareLeft]

If young people are retreating into the online world, it's because we've made the real world too hostile, expensive, and alienating to them.

[Steve Howell @FromSteveHowell]

Queen Mary University researchers have identified 286 cases involving climate and Palestine-solidarity activists who were sent to prison for protesting for a total jail time of 136 years.

If this was in another country, wouldn't we call it authoritarian? https://t.co/4ndUyEfVe9

[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]

[Les Monaghan @LesMonaghan]

'Voice of the People' pop up exhibition at Barnsley Civic for the General Strike Centenary event right now - standing room only! And Tanju, the star of the photograph nearest camera is here too 💚 @UniteNEYH @MichaelAD_Unite @unitetheunion

[Paula 🍉 @PaulaCoyscot]

Funny they’ve never suggested a special police force to protect women. We just have to put up with the one that has a history of murdering and raping us, and photographing our naked bodies after we’re murdered in parks.

[Jean Jacques Dessalines 🇭🇹🇵🇸🇳🇪🇲🇱🇧🇫🇨🇺 @JeanJacquesDes7]

Clara Mattei demonstrates how Marxist critique can calmly dismantle liberal/capitalist assumptions with intellectual rigor, responding not with anger but with patience and clarity that exposes the limits of a narrowly formed worldview.

Radical_ideas_

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

Everyone should read what the Israeli military did to journalist Amal Khalil today in this minute-by-minute account as the international community watched in horror. First the text messages threatening her then trapping her and a photographer in a house then bombing them then firing on international rescue crews, all with the world watching in real time. There are no words left for the horrors that U.S. political leaders are enabling.

[Idrees Ahmad @im_PULSE]

If you had to read one thing today, make it this powerful @lrb piece by @weizman_eyal on the assault on Gaza and its precedents in colonial genocides through what Lemkin called ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’
https://t.co/D0bsg3qVVy

[Les Monaghan @LesMonaghan]

@danhind @JW_Gallagher they used the IRA connection among ex-Forces

[Les Monaghan @LesMonaghan]

His five children were all killed, along with his wife who was nine months pregnant with their sixth child, a girl they were planning to name Haifa, after her martyred aunt. His brother, sister-in-law and all of their children were also killed.

https://t.co/ZSmw7LjJEw

[Ghassan Abu Sitta, Chair of Conflict Medicine AUB @GhassanAbuSitt1]

Al Jazeera investigation reveals how US-supplied thermal and thermobaric munitions burning at 3,500C have left no trace of nearly 3,000 Palestinians
https://t.co/KuKrjNS470

[Mosab Abu Toha @MosabAbuToha]

Over the past 2 years, Israel has killed over 600 athletes in Gaza and destroyed nearly all 264 sports clubs and facilities, effectively erasing an entire sporting community. Yet despite this devastation, Israel continues to participate freely in global sporting events.

The world’s complicity in these war crimes is unspeakable.

[Les Monaghan @LesMonaghan]

https://t.co/Ih0JQn17yo

[Jonathan Whittall @_jwhittall]

I have published the photos I took during the assessment I was part of in northern #Gaza in January 2024. The findings were written up by USAID in a cable that was reportedly blocked by the US Embassy at the time, according to a Reuters investigation.

[nazir afzal @nazirafzal]

They have names, flight logs, visitors, videos, photos, sworn statements
They have evidence

They’ve only released half the files because the rest is so terrible

Only a woman has been prosecuted

These billionaires think you’re stupid

Prosecute the Predators

#EpsteinFiles

[Trussell @TrussellUK]

Everyone should be able to afford food.
Everyone should be able to afford a warm home.
Everyone should be able to afford deodorant and soap.

Everyone should be able to afford the essentials.

[Trussell @TrussellUK]

26 years ago, there were no food banks. Now, because of rising food, rent and bills, and our poor social security system there are over 1,400.

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

In the 6th largest economy 103000 people died in poverty in 2024.

120000 died in fuel poverty, couldn't afford heating.

Ethnic minorities, pensioners, single working age adults more likely to die in poverty

Poverty, premature death is a political choice
https://t.co/imX7QGDnHh