🇵🇸 Fire-handling hominin, not-very-social scientist, unsettled colonial, extinguished professor. He/him. "Planetary Social Thought"@politybooks
Lancaster, UK
Joined October 2020
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Indulging myself today for reasons that will remain unspoken....
How it started How its going
school project 1973 school project 2020
Nigel Clark retweeted
3 years
🗣️'This is a massacre'
Ministry of Health in Gaza held a press conference at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital among the bodies and remains of the victims of the Israeli attack that left more than 500 dead ⤵️ v.aa.com.tr/3024272
Nigel Clark retweeted
I listened to Mariam speaking. She kept repeating the same heartbreaking words:
“I want my mum.”
“My body hurts.”
“There was a lot of fire.”
Nigel Clark retweeted
Thread:
Two days ago, Israeli warplanes bombed an apartment in Gaza. A woman named Reem Awad was burned to death before the eyes of her little daughter, Maryam, who was not yet four years old.
Perhaps you have seen the video of Maryam lying on her bed, watching the flames consume everything around her, including her mother.
I keep wondering what a little girl of four could possibly think at such a moment.
Did she call for her mother? Did she wait for her to get up and carry her away from the flames, as mothers always do when their children are frightened? Did she wonder why her mother would not come to her anymore?
I do not know. And I wish no child had ever been made to discover the answers.
It is terrible enough to think of a person burning to death. But to think of a little girl watching her own mother burn, unable to do anything, is more than my heart can understand.
Maryam’s father was killed at the beginning of the war. She has no brothers or sisters. Now she has no mother either.
At an age when a child should still be learning the simplest things about life, Maryam must somehow learn to live without the person who was meant to keep all the frightening things in the world away from her.
And the last thing she saw of that person was her death.
Nigel Clark retweeted
Rough operating day:
9 year old girl from Gaza. Shoulder reconstruction. Both parents killed. Cared for by uncle.
5 year old boy from Gaza. Right lower limb amputation. For revision of stump so he can start fitting a prosthesis.
Medical student from Lebanon, early twenties. Blast Injury to face with loss of both eyes. For reconstruction of facial bones and eyelids so he can have glass eyes fitted.
To top the day off, message from lawyers: High Court Appeal case by GMC, court date set for end of January 2027.
Nigel Clark retweeted
Gaza before October 7:
1- Up to an 80% unemployment rate
2- Over 80% total reliance on aid
3- Almost a million people lived across 8 refugee camps
4- At least 40,000 people resided in dilapidated shelters
5- 5360 Palestinians killed and 115,000 wounded from Jan 2008 to Sep 2023.
6- 30% of applications for permits by critical patients in Gaza were turned down by Israel every month leading to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of deaths.
7- Upwards of two-thirds of a yearly 1000 recorded successful applicants for international universities from Gaza were denied travel.
skinheads for Palestine ✊
Shabana Mahmood has defended the government’s ban on Palestine Action by saying its supporters should face the same law as “skinheads” who back a neo-Nazi organisation.
Speaking on the Rest Is Politics podcast, the home secretary was asked about the thousands of people arrested for publicly supporting Palestine Action.
Mahmood, who was previously a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, said that while she was “very uncomfortable” seeing people she knew “falling foul” of the law, it had to be applied consistently.
“When you get a group of skinheads standing outside a mosque, holding up a placard saying ‘I support National Action’, I’m going to want the Section 13 support offence to be applied,” she said.
“And I’m going to want the police to go and arrest those people… And I’m going to want them to degrade the capacity of a white supremacist terror organisation to recruit more members.”
National Action is a neo-Nazi organisation which was proscribed under the Terrorism Act in 2016.
Palestine Action was proscribed by former home secretary Yvette Cooper in July 2025, making it a criminal offence to belong to or express support for the group.
“You have to do these jobs in a consistent way that stands the test of time,” Mahmood said. “I’m not going to reopen every decision every previous home secretary has made. Was it lawful? Yes it was. Does it meet the legal test? Yes it does.”
She added that a decision to repeal the ban would involve having “to literally relitigate everything".
Asked what triggered the government’s decision to outlaw the group, she said: “It’s proscribed because it’s met the test for proscription within the Terrorism Act,” and that “the facts of their behaviour and the escalatory effect of their behaviour” were contributing factors.
Critics of the ban, however, argue that the central question is not whether Section 13 should be applied consistently, but whether Palestine Action should have been placed under terrorism legislation in the first place – and whether expressing support for the group should constitute a terrorism offence.
A spokesperson for campaign group Defend Our Juries, quoted by Morning Star, accused Mahmood of “missing the point entirely” and said she had provided “no evidence that Palestine Action should have been proscribed in the first place”.
Defend Our Juries has organised multiple protests against the ban, resulting in mass arrests, most recently at the Labour party conference in Liverpool.
Mahmood’s comments strike a different tone to that of foreign secretary Ed Miliband, who told conference delegates that Brits were “right” to be outraged by the plight of Palestinians.
In June, the court of appeal upheld the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action, overturning an earlier high court ruling that found the ban unlawful. This was followed by a supreme court ruling in July allowing Palestine Action founder Huda Ammori to appeal the ban. The hearing is expected this autumn.
Nigel Clark retweeted
.@AssalRad explains why she got interested in Palestine. There is right or wrong reason to care about any particular issue, but what a 🎯 response.
Nigel Clark retweeted
For more than two months, I have been working on a truly horrific story about one of the gravest war crimes committed by the United States since Vietnam: The bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran. It was one of the first targets struck in the opening hours of the war on February 28, 2026.
At least 156 people were killed in the U.S. cruise missile strikes—120 of them were children and 26 were teachers. We spoke to survivors, first responders, parents, doctors, teachers, psychologists, and other witnesses. Some of them had never before shared their experiences of that day.
It would be impossible to do justice to what happened in Minab that day with words alone. In more than 25 years in journalism and reporting on war, I do not believe I have reported on a more heinous single crime.
Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave
dropsitenews.com/p/minab-sch…
Please share this story with as many people as you can.
Nigel Clark retweeted
A double lie here from Ed Miliband:
1. He doesn't need to wait for the Supreme Court to rule on Palestine Action's proscription. The Burnham government could overturn the decision tomorrow if it so chose.
2. Miliband says no one's intent was to criminalise "grannies and vicars" for holding up signs. He's right. That's because the Starmer government imagined it could misuse terrorism laws to intimidate the respectable, white middle classes into silence on genocide.
The plan was to leave "brown" people isolated and exposed to the full force of the law if they raised their voices in protest. The Labour government hoped to associate in the public's mind opposition to genocide with supposed Islamic extremism. It massively underestimated public revulsion at the genocide and the UK's complicity.
Don't expect anyone in the establishment media, including Andrew Marr, to highlight either of these very obvious and salient points.
Nigel Clark retweeted
There are sounds you hear only once, but they stay with you forever.
The voice of my friend Shadi from beneath the rubble is one of them.
The place where Shadi and his family were staying was struck.
Within moments, the house was reduced to rubble.
But Shadi did not die immediately.
He was alive beneath the debris.
We could hear his moans.
His voice came from between the stones and rubble, weak and exhausted, but it was enough for us to know that Shadi was still alive.
Hours passed…
And Shadi was still there.
Imagine knowing that your friend is only a few meters away from you.
You know he is alive.
You can hear his voice.
You know he is in pain.
But you cannot reach him.
I don’t know how anyone can describe that feeling.
Every time we heard him, there was still hope that we might be able to get him out.
But time kept passing.
Hour after hour.
And his voice grew weaker.
Then…
We heard nothing.
Shadi’s voice disappeared from beneath the rubble.
The silence that followed his moans was more painful than the moans themselves.
We understood what had happened without anyone having to tell us.
Shadi died beneath the rubble.
His family died too.
Sometimes I think about his final hours.
What did he feel while trapped beneath his own home?
Could he hear the voices of people outside?
Was he waiting for a hand to reach him and pull him out from beneath the stones?
Did he believe, every moment, that help was coming?
I don’t know.
And perhaps I never will.
But I know one thing:
I heard my friend’s voice while he was still alive…
And then I heard the silence that followed.
War does not leave you only with images of those who died.
Sometimes, it leaves you with a sound.
The sound of someone you love crying out from beneath the rubble, growing weaker and weaker until it disappears.
Shadi is gone.
His family is gone with him.
But his voice has never left my memory.
Even today, when I remember him, the first thing I remember is not the rubble…
I remember his moans. 💔
Nigel Clark retweeted
Yesterday I met four students from Gaza who arrived in Ireland yesterday on government scholarships. Many others are still waiting for the same narrow opening to appear in this enormous wall.
The first had been forced to leave without her son. Ireland passed before her eyes without leaving a trace; he was the only thing happening inside her. The second had survived more than three years of genocide, and I had imagined no fear could rise above what she had already endured.
Yet she was afraid of what comes next: of an ordinary life she no longer knows how to enter, and of a silence she cannot trust to last. The third kept smiling and asking about roads, times and names, but his questions resembled luggage opened at the wrong airport.
The fourth would drift away for long moments, then return to say that he still could not believe he had made it out.
Four people arrived, but they did not arrive alone. The homes they were forced to leave entered with them, along with the faces that could not cross and the fear that Gaza might close its mouth behind them forever.
Do not congratulate them on survival too quickly. Sit beside them for a while, and leave empty chairs for those who travelled with them but remained invisible to the border. Do not disappear when the ceremonies of arrival are over. Abandonment knows exactly how to arrive late.
Nigel Clark retweeted
Good morning to Ameer Al-Hanawi. 💔
A Palestinian child who lost all four limbs during the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Ameer still plays football with his friends—reclaiming a piece of the childhood taken from him.
📷 Abood AbuSalama
Nigel Clark retweeted
Non solo NAZA.
“Citizen Osama”, film di Ahmed Hassouna, regista palestinese di Gaza, alla Mostra del Cinema di Venezia è stato inserito solo nella sezione Fuori Concorso e regista e attori non hanno potuto partecipare, ma ora è candidato agli Oscar.
La critica internazionale lo
A shocking record
But it misses out USA itself. On May 13 1985 the US bombed its own citizens
Two explosive devices were dropped by police helicopters targeting the Philadelphia-based Black liberation organization MOVE. 6 adults and 5 children were killed, 61 houses burnt down
Nigel Clark retweeted
In early 20thc 80% of the African Herero tribe (Namibia) were wiped out by German colonialists.The rest were taken into slavery. In revenge they adopted a caricature of the dress of their oppressors, neutralising their power (via J. Naughten 'Conflict & Costume' ) #WomensArt #DressesWeek 👗
Nigel Clark retweeted
Practically no one knows about it, because it was in Libya: no tourists, few journalists. One of the people killed was the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, who warned of the disaster on facebook days before the flood, and even wrote poems about the risk to Derna from the dam upstream.
Nigel Clark retweeted
Re Nepal and climate disaster. Since 2023, I have started pretty much all my talks (and I give roughly 1 per week for my sins) with this picture of Derna, Libya. This is still, to my knowledge, the world's single deadliest climate disaster. 10'000-20'000 people killed overnight.
Nigel Clark retweeted
Interview with the Observer
observer.co.uk/news/internat…
