Sandy Fleming

Ex journalist, Irish, mother, fiery, not known to suffer fools gladly, party animal, views very much my own

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Mehdi Hasan slams Elon Musk, "He is obsessed with finding these cases where he can then amplify far right voices"

"He doesn't just do it in England with Tommy Robinson, he does it in German with the AfD, obviously he does it in the US with Twitter"

Victoria Derbyshire, "What is he seeking to do?"

Mehdi Hasan, "He's seeking to embolden some of the worst far right voices in the Western world"

"That's why he's funding so many people all over the place"

"This is his agenda. It's a very racist agenda. We see that in the US with the Republican party"

"Elon Musk amplifies some of the most neo-nazi voices on Twitter"

"You can take the boy out of apartheid South Africa, can you take apartheid South Africa out of the boy?"

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

"I read an interview with 2 care workers who were in their house, in the flames.. it was a local vicar who managed to.. talk to the people outside to get them to pause to allow these two women to escape. How is that meant to make you feel in your home? Its absolutely unspeakable"

[Dylan Williams @dylanotes]

Israeli troops shot a Palestinian baby in the head in the occupied West Bank.

They stood by as his family pleaded for help, desperately trying to stop the bleeding as the child died.

This is the reality of Israel’s US-armed war on the Palestinian people.
https://t.co/KTTukgtLyY

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

"They're not hostages. They're in prison for crimes."

the crimes

[Daniela Nadj @danielanadj77]

Northern Ireland is the least ethnically diverse part of the UK. It is 97% white. Many of the ethnic minorities who came to Northern Ireland were invited to come and work as nurses to fill critical gaps in the health care sector. #bbcnews

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Falmouth MP Jayne Kirkham reform of water industry."

It's incredible when you think about it, South West Water has just been fined £1.85 million for poisoning a whole town, Brixham win Devon, that's the 165th offence they're been found guilty of and yet they still have an operating licence?

What's the hells going on?

https://t.co/YLukkFNY9d

[𝚁𝚒𝚣 @R12wan]

These are the mother fuckers who need deporting.

Send each one to Rwanda.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

No, sweetie.

Donetsk was a city of a million roses when its own Ukrainian flag flew above it.

Back then, it was also the fastest-growing and most rapidly prospering city in Ukraine -- home to what was the finest regional airport in Eastern Europe, one of the world's best football stadiums, a state-of-the-art railway terminal, and one of the cleanest, best-maintained cities in the region.

Its elites were running Kyiv, and every time I visited Donetsk as a student, riding the famous trolleybus Route No. 2 through the city, I was amazed by how many new office buildings were appearing, how much money was flowing into the city, and how many international companies were opening their doors there.

Fifteen years ago, to us kids from Donbas, Donetsk felt like the center of the universe because it had everything one could possibly dream of. It was a young city of universities and libraries, where the overwhelming majority of boys and girls from across Donbas went to study, including those from my own small hometown an hour away by bus.

Names like Liverpool or Detroit Rock City may mean nothing to you, but our Ukrainian Donetsk was a city of great rock clubs and unforgettable concerts. We traveled there to see Western bands perform.

We bought rock merchandise at the legendary Right House store near Krytyi Market. Scorpions, Rihanna, and Beyoncé performed at the famous Donbass Arena. Schoolchildren from across Donbas were bused in to watch Shakhtar Donetsk matches. The city even had a famous monument to The Beatles.

It was a city where we sang songs on guitars in its beautifully maintained parks and along the Kalmius embankment before heading out to buy the famous "green Donetsk burgers." Our older friends moved there after graduation, formed rock bands, recorded full albums, and held wedding celebrations in the squares around Donbas Arena. We traveled there to visit the legendary Radio Market in search of films, music, and books.

And then you arrived.

And you turned the wealthiest, most prosperous Ukrainian city into a piece of shit.

You deceived many of its people with sweet promises of Russian oil-fueled prosperity broadcast from television screens, but what you brought instead was war.

You transformed a thriving city into a criminal wasteland ruled by ethnic gangs from Russia, into a kingdom of Stalinist terror straight out of the 1930s, complete with torture chambers in the infamous Izolyatsia prison camp. You turned the magnificent Donetsk Airport into lifeless gray rubble, while the vast stands of Donbas Arena have spent a second decade slowly being reclaimed by weeds instead of hosting Champions League finals and Metallica concerts.

You swept away an entire generation of the city's men through your forced mobilization and threw them against Ukrainian machine guns until there were barely enough people left to keep basic municipal services running. Because of you, prosperous Donetsk became a withered desert without reliable water, because your war destroyed the canal system that carried water from the Siverskyi Donets River into Donbas. For years now, people have lived with chronic water shortages and have been reduced shitting into plastic bags forever.

You dragged Donetsk back like seventy years in time. You turned it into a depressed backwater, devoid of hope and future. Even ten years ago, tens of thousands of people, the most active, the most talented, the most entrepreneurial, fled the city and found refuge in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Many of them still remember our Donetsk with tears in their eyes, the Donetsk that existed before the arrival of the "Russian World."

You transformed it into something that even my pro-Russian acquaintances are shocked to see when they return after years of occupation.

It was you who trampled the million roses of our Ukrainian Donetsk into shit beneath the tracks of your tanks and the boots of your death troops, turning them into a foul swamp of death and despair.

And that stain will forever remain on the conscience of fascist Russia, which brings nothing but destruction, decay, and death wherever it goes.

[🇬🇧King 🇬🇧 @King0243_PJC]

Has anyone noticed Suella Braverman & Robert Jenrick have gone strangely silent since the Sudanese attacker’s immigration status went public?

They were loud on the Sikh Southampton case and ignored Henry Nowak’s father’s pleas.
Why the sudden quiet? 🤔#Immigration #TwoTier

[Paul Gosling @PaulGosling1]

I'm a white migrant to Northern Ireland. If I were a non-white migrant or born citizen here, working in health or social care, I would be seriously consider my future here. This is a crisis not just for the character of our society, but also for our core public services.

[RTR Swipe @RTRSwipe]

@I_amMukhtar Just seen a vox pop in Makerfield on C4. An old dear said 'It's 50/50 here now between us and immigrants". Makerfield is 97% white British. I recall a similar vox pop the day after Brexit in Sedgefield, when these old miners said the same thing - and Sedgefield was 97% white too

[Sophy Ridge @SophyRidgeSky]

Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley very strong on scenes in Belfast:

"I was watching a bit of the news last night, and I can't remember what channel it was, but a journalist was talking about 'these protesters.'

"I thought, that isn't a protest. People are setting fire to cars. That's not a protest. That's violent disorder, that's criminality. I really feel for Northern Ireland colleagues who are wrestling with that. It's really, really difficult.

"We live in these volatile times and, some of what goes on online whips up, sentiment on the street.

"We know that Russian state actors, Iranian state actors, they want to sow discord on the streets of the UK. So this is a really complex issue we're wrestling with. So you've got very polarised debates in the UK, and you've got other people overseas who want to drive wedge issues to create disorder, and you've got the great men and women of Police Service Northern Ireland on the streets in the middle of that, trying to sort of protect people and stop people burning down houses and things. It's awful."

[Roshan M Salih @RmSalih]

The racist violence in Northern Ireland is not a reaction to the attempted killing of a white man by a suspected Sudanese immigrant.

It has been planned and organised for years by far right organisations with links to far right actors in England and elsewhere.

In a nutshell, white unionists in Protestant areas are being radicalised to hate Muslims and immigrants in a systematic way.

Muslims make up less than 1 per cent of Northern Ireland's population but they are being presented as a threat and are being accused of "taking over."

Where have you heard this before?

[George Galloway @georgegalloway]

These people have been burning out innocent families in the north of Ireland for as long as I’ve been alive. And mostly white, Christian families at that. Before a black face was ever seen in Belfast there were plenty of black hearts

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Belfast knife suspect won asylum in Britain under 'fast-track' scheme introduced by Tory UK govt.

Then home secretary Suella Braverman & immigration minister Robert Jenrick – who have both since defected to Reform - oversaw the introduction of the scheme.
https://t.co/zzrkYVMZ92

[IslamophobiaUK @uk_islamophobia]

Meet Stephen-Lee McIlvenny.

21 years old. West Belfast.

77 charges. Rape. Child sexual abuse. Coercion.

Three boys. Aged 14–15. Targeted, blackmailed, filmed.

Sentenced to 23 years.

Not a migrant. Northern Irish.

Where was the outrage. The mob. The murals.

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

I thought that if Israeli soldiers or settlers attacked Christian villages, the Christian world would unite in their millions in condemnation that their sacred sites were being burnt and erased.

[TerriWin. 🌹No Pasaran @terriwin]

These four scumbags have just been jailed for knifing s young father on his own, they left him to bleed out. No one rioted

[Anna Maria Junus @JunusAnna]

I remember a time when women didn't have to explain why they didn't want to undress in front of strange, creepy men.

Everybody understood. Not only did they understand, they would have thought you were odd to want to undress in front of strange, creepy men.

[Robert Burns @Nugent4nil]

The police chased Ronnie Briggs for 39 years for his part in the great train robbery. 2.3 million was stolen, the equivalent of 62.3 million today, 39 years for 63.3 million. Why aren’t the government and police arresting people for the billions stolen by fraud during Covid?