Mark Ranford

The Future will be decentralized, Care to Dream

[Mark Ranford @ranford]

Can't get Deodands out of my mind! Let's build voices for nature, never before could this be done, now it's possible with Ethereum DAOs

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.

https://t.co/EuKgGWBRhS

[Muse @xmuse_]

One of the most shockingly underrated masterpieces of the Renaissance is Anthonis Mor’s portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1560), now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

When people see it today, especially in high-resolution pics, they often mistake it for a 19th-century photograph or even a hyper-realistic AI generation.

The skin texture, the eyes, the subtle sheen on the black fabric, make it feel almost disturbingly modern.

Yet this painting, created over 460 years ago, barely registers in the mainstream conversation about great art.

It deserves far more recognition.

[Mark Ranford @ranford]

@ahmedsohail @Nd47273926 your open mind is what is needed by more people

Btw that was Sammy woodhouse who herself was a victim of the grooming gangs from age 12 - so I think her “ firebrand” manner possibly came from her own pain she has endured and experienced

[Liza Rosen @LizaRosen0000]

HIS DAUGHTER DIED IN HIS ARMS. THEN HE WAS KIDNAPPED TO GAZA.

On October 7, the Idan family from Kibbutz Nahal Oz lost their 18-year-old daughter, Maayan. Hamas terrorists shot her inside the family safe room. She died in her father Tsachi’s arms.

Moments later, Tsachi Idan, 49, was abducted to Gaza. His wife Gali’s phone was seized, and the attackers livestreamed the family’s terror to her Facebook contacts. In the footage, the family huddles on the kitchen floor, covered in Maayan’s blood, while the younger children cry out in Hebrew: “Are they killing us? Are they killing us?”

Tsachi’s hands were cuffed behind his back during one of the most documented abductions in the kibbutz. His children can be heard begging the Palestinian Muslim terrorists not to take their father.

“I love you. Don’t be a hero, be smart. Take care of yourself and come back to me in one piece,” Gali screamed as they dragged Tsachi away.

Tsachi was later murdered in captivity.

This was deliberate cruelty carried out by Hamas in the name of Islam. No family should ever endure this again. Islam is a death cult.

[dan linnaeus @DanLinnaeus]

The Civil Commission’s two-year investigation led by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, released yesterday, reviewed more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, conducted over 1,800 hours of cumulative visual analysis, ran more than 430 formal and informal interviews, mapped victims across 52 nationalities, geolocated and cross-referenced against the standing UN COI’s findings, and built a curated archive under a stated “do no harm” trauma-informed methodology.

The Commission identifies thirteen recurring patterns across sites, including a category they call “kinocidal sexual violence,” meaning sexual and gender-based violence deliberately staged in front of family members or coercing family members into participating, weaponizing kinship itself in order to destroy the family unit.

They reach legal conclusions: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocidal acts, sexual violence linked to terrorism.

The kinocidal category is going to be a durable analytical contribution from this report. The Commission had introduced “kinocide” in its 2023 paper, but this report elevates it to a legal-analytical category, kinocidal sexual violence. It names a thing that previously had no home in the SGBV literature, sexual violence engineered as an attack on the family-as-unit, not just on individuals, and it does so with the kind of evidentiary backing, and the kind of legal-academic imprimatur via Shany, Crane, Cotler, that makes it citeable in international fora, in court filings, and in ICC and ICJ briefs.

As Dr. Elkayam-Levy writes in her preface, “There are moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves. Moments that do more than shatter lives; they unsettle the very boundaries by which human conduct is understood. October 7, 2023 was such a moment.”

Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity is 298 pages of monumental import for international criminal justice, led by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy with principal contributor Hon. Irwin Cotler, and distinguished contributors including David Crane (founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone) and Yuval Shany (former UN Human Rights Committee).

It is endorsed by Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Ambassador Isabelle Rome (France’s Ambassador at-Large for Human Rights), Alice Wairimu Nderitu (Former UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide), Noëlle Lenoir (Former Justice on the French Constitutional Court), Aharon Barak (Former President of the Supreme Court of Israel) and Mukesh Kapila (Former Special Adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), among many others.

Report English PDF: https://t.co/0s46gPZ1dY

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

A while ago, I watched the infamous 47-minute video documenting the atrocities of October 7th — the one not made publicly available, to protect the privacy of the victims.

The worst part of this video is not what it displays, but who is displaying it: the perpetrators themselves. Gleefully. Sadistically. Unabashedly. Most of the footage was filmed by Hamas terrorists on their GoPro bodycams, some also by ordinary Gazan civilians on their cellphones.

Even the Nazis tried to cover up their atrocities, but Hamas brags about theirs for the entire world to see. The killers are euphoric throughout the massacre, and their relentless, ecstatic cries of "Allahu Akbar" (punctuated by the occasional "Kill the Jew!") are simply nauseating.

Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear — one with his eye socket hanging out of his face — asking his brother whether he thinks they're going to die, while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade in their saferoom helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.

Neither will I ever forget the terrorists playing football with a severed head. Or the Thai migrant worker whose head is viciously hacked off with a garden hoe — another "Zionist colonizer" getting what he deserved, right?https://t.co/JvfJEtk8LA
Or the throngs of Gazans crowding around pickup trucks loaded with the mutilated corpses of Jewish women, filming and spitting on the bodies. Or the woman in Kibbutz Mefalsim, crouching and begging in vain for mercy.

There is some evidence of sexual violence in the video — the charred corpse of a young woman with her legs splayed and her genitals exposed — but not much. Apparently even Hamas draws a line somewhere: they are not as proud of raping Jewish women as they are of murdering them. Or, more likely, they simply didn't want to embarrass the delicate sensibilities of their legions of useful idiots in the West.

But yes — there was rape. Not "rape" in scare quotes, as the apologists would have it, but sadistic, murderous sexual violence, documented in a new damning new report by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women's rights NGO. (video summary here: https://t.co/LTTjiO1s7E)

Across its 180 pages, the report describes "a recurring pattern of rape and gang rape; sexual torture; mutilation; targeted shooting to the face, head and genital area; forced nudity; binding and restraint; genital burning; objects inserted into intimate areas; post-mortem sexual humiliation; and execution during or after sexual assault."

And it was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like "take off your pants," "lie down," "spread your legs," and "don't make trouble." I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?

I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.
https://t.co/PoKUfIHeXV

[Stewart Wiseman @stewartwiseman]

Today, the Civil Commission released Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity — the product of more than two years of documentation, legal analysis, archival work, and testimony collection. It is the most important work I have ever been part of.

This report was born in the space between atrocity and denial. It documents patterns of sexual and gender-based violence committed during the October 7 attacks and in captivity, preserving evidence that too many sought to minimize, dismiss, or erase.

The work demanded confronting materials and testimonies of extraordinary brutality. Justice cannot exist without recognition, and recognition cannot exist without people willing to preserve the truth with rigor, care, and moral clarity.

What makes this report so significant is not only the scale of the investigation (hundreds of testimonies, thousands of visual records, years of analysis) but its insistence that these crimes be understood within the frameworks of international law, accountability, and human dignity.

Contributing to this report has been one of the most meaningful and consequential responsibilities of my life. Working alongside an extraordinary team of lawyers, archivists, and documenters, I had the privilege of contributing to the report’s legal findings and analysis under international human rights and international criminal law, helping document and assess crimes that many sought to deny, minimize, or erase.

I hope people will read the report in full, engage seriously with its findings, and understand what is at stake when sexual violence in conflict is denied, politicized, or ignored.

The truth deserves a permanent place in the historical and legal record.

Link to full report below.

@CochavElkayam @theCC07

[Mark Ranford @ranford]

@piersmorgan Just do very sad 😞

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

Absolutely horrific, and even worse than we already knew, which I didn’t think possible. Including clear evidence of appalling sex crimes by Hamas which their deluded defenders have always denied.

[Mark Ranford @ranford]

@gajesh Definitely keen to look into this - and test it out

[Mark Ranford @ranford]

@Zero2HeroZombie Should have a community notes type feature like on X for the proposals so easier to detect spam

[S A M M Y Woodhouse @officialsammyuk]

Another remarkable survivor has given testimony. She was abused and raped by Iraqi men. She described how they slaughtered a sheep in the bath and ate it, and how they called her “English pig dog.” She later became pregnant by an Iraqi man who was in the country illegally. He gained full care of her child, which meant she was no longer able to see the child. She has provided photographs of the man and the child in Iraq, with an AK-47 in the background. @rapeganginquiry @RupertLowe10

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

The details emerging about what the rape gangs (why call them 'grooming' gangs? It's like calling those who stab people to death 'knife owners') did to girls in Rotherham are downright horrific. The allegations of possible police corruption in the case are almost beyond belief.

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

I cannot bear it.
Police decided children found naked and drugged with their abusers had “consented” to sex.
Are we so innured to this monstrous evil that it doesn’t dominate the headlines?

[Mark Ranford @ranford]

Heartbreaking 💔

[S A M M Y Woodhouse @officialsammyuk]

Today, we opened the hearings for the Rape Gang Inquiry.

My opening statement…

[S A M M Y Woodhouse @officialsammyuk]

Today, we opened the hearings for the Rape Gang Inquiry.

My opening statement…

[Mark Ranford @ranford]

@Telford_Escaper God loves you so much Correne, I know it’s so hard for you but god brought you to this world with a purpose, you are very important not just to your beautiful son, but to many others here who aren’t as brave as you but who also share your suffering, they need you ❤️

[נועה מגיד | Noa magid @NoaMagid]

Six minutes of massacre in Tehran.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

I have just looked at the BBC News website

Not a mention of Iran

Multiple sackings, please

[Rayan Amiri @realRayanAmiri]

🚨 BREAKING — Historic scenes in Tehran, Iran, as anti-Islamist-regime, pro-Shah protests rapidly spread across multiple neighborhoods. Streets are gridlocked in southern Tehran’s Naziabad district as protesters chant for the fall of the regime. Share this for the world to see.