Olivia
Online
affectionate machine-tickling aphid
@voline
avid reader, carpenter, ultra-left
NYC
Joined March 2009
691 Following
194 Followers
6.7K Posts
Israel executed baby Sam today with a bullet to the face in the occupied West Bank.
They killed his mother too.
Sam was only 7 months old.
They murdered a mother. And her infant.
Death threats against me. A subpoena from Congress. Interviews cancelled and censored. A source indicted. Witnesses killed. Read the book that the corrupt national security state and criminal actors within it have fought tooth and nail to suppress. Now available in paperback.
🚨🚨🚨 Kushner Albania deal
The best piece of journalism I’ve seen on this issue.
The Filton 25 Trial represents a turning point for the rule of law and against necrocapitalism.
ELBIT is involved in the commission of heinous crimes in Palestine (see my report Economy of Genocide). It is also one of the most exportable tools of Israel's model of democracy.
Who to follow
After an Israeli airstrike hit the town of Nabatiyeh, #Lebanon, a family of 12 arrived at Najdeh Al-Shaabiyeh hospital. Six were killed, including a two-year-old boy.
Dr. Mina Naguib reports:
When a family member attempted to cross a barrier to embrace their loved ones, the Ertzaintza (Basque autonomous police) suddenly and shockingly responded with violence.
What should have been a moment of relief and familial comfort was interrupted by even more brutality.
The IOF are SHOOTING at innocent and UNARMED activists delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza.
📌They do this openly, in the exact same way they have been oppressing, attacking, and murdering the Palestinian people for decades.
Is this the "most moral army in the world"?!
Judge Temporarily Blocks U.S. Sanctions Against U.N. Expert on Occupied Palestinian Territories https://t.co/l39fvjsKY4
BREAKING! US court ha suspended the US sanctions against me!
As the judge says: "Protecting the Freedom of speech is always just the public interest".
Thanks to my daughter and my husband for stepping up to defend me, and everyone who has helped so far.
Together we are One.
The U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals has reinstated deportation proceedings against Mohsen Mahdawi, a graduate student at Columbia University who was detained last April for his outspoken support for Palestinian rights. Mahdawi is a green card holder who grew up in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
At Columbia, he served as co-president of the Palestinian Student Union and president of the Buddhist Association. In April of 2025, masked and hooded ICE agents detained him when he appeared for what he believed would be a naturalization interview in Vermont. He spent two weeks in ICE custody before a federal judge ordered his release.
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)
“We are speaking about systematic transformation of life into something unlivable,” says Eyad Amawi, a representative of the Gaza Relief Committee who recently published a report detailing how Gaza is facing an “environmental and biological apocalypse.” According to Amawi, there are widespread rodent infestations in tent encampments, water is scarce, and food is often spoiled.
I made a super simple website where you can see everywhere you can get to in under an hour on the NYC subway.
The generated map is both a heat-map (changes color) and a cartogram (warps space).
https://t.co/liTziAmQEd
Greta Thunberg demands the release of all members of the flotilla who were kidnapped by Israel in international waters.
🚨🚨🚨 HAPPENING NOW @globalsumudflotilla @gbsumudflotilla THIS IS BEING COMPLETELY SUPRESSED‼️ #KIDNAPPING #InternationalWater #Aid #Gaza
Our new report finds that Israel uses water as a weapon of collective punishment against Palestinians in #Gaza, by destroying infrastructure and imposing restrictions on aid access.
Read the report: https://t.co/GJMPAIwJ0l
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is being held unlawfully. His arbitrary detention must immediately be brought to an end. Each additional day compounds the responsibility of those detaining him.
May all Palestinian hostages be released soon.
May the perpetrators face justice soon.
🚨Israel assassinated Imad Miqdad yesterday in a drone strike, targeting his solar-powered phone charging station in Gaza yesterday.
Miqdad had been providing civilians with a rare means of communication amid ongoing electricity cuts.
The strike killed him and destroyed the facility, further limiting access to basic services and connectivity for residents.
The Israeli military’s killing of Amal Khalil, Al-Akhbar journalist in Lebanon, has provoked anger and despair in Lebanon, where people have been forced to contend, again and again, with the Israeli military’s chilling disregard for civilian lives.
Since 2023, Israeli attacks have repeatedly killed journalists and paramedics in the course of their work. International investigations are urgently required. Not later, now.
Details of how Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was “pursued” and killed by Israeli forces have been released by the network she worked for. Here’s what happened ⤵️
Most Popular Users
Elon Musk 
@elonmusk
240.1M followers
Barack Obama
@barackobama
119.3M followers
Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
111.6M followers
Cristiano Ronaldo
@cristiano
109.1M followers
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
106.9M followers
Rihanna
@rihanna
97.3M followers
NASA
@nasa
92.1M followers
Justin Bieber
@justinbieber
90.6M followers
KATY PERRY
@katyperry
86.9M followers
Taylor Swift
@taylorswift13
80.7M followers
Lady Gaga
@ladygaga
72.3M followers
Kim Kardashian
@kimkardashian
69.4M followers
Virat Kohli
@imvkohli
68.7M followers
YouTube
@youtube
68.6M followers
Bill Gates
@billgates
63.4M followers
The Ellen Show
@theellenshow
62.5M followers
CNN
@cnn
61.9M followers
Neymar Jr
@neymarjr
61.3M followers
X
@x
60.9M followers
Selena Gomez
@selenagomez
60M followers