Thunberg and her compatriots will be deported back to Europe soon enough, but perhaps not before they are made to wallow in their own contemptible moral blindness.
Greta Thunberg, a professional obsessive who was once deemed a righteous voice of our collective conscience until it was revealed that she didn’t have one, is on a quest for attention. Jeff has already predicted where the perverse incentives toward one-upmanship in political activism lead. We should be prepared for the day when Thunberg succumbs to the temptation to outdo herself, begetting an ignominious end to her career in public life that hopefully takes all her thoughtless boosters’ reputations down with her.
In the meantime, however, we can enjoy the efforts from targets of Thunberg’s thoughtless agitation to impose some shame on their tormentor. Quite unlike the beaten and broken Western commercial interests that supplicated before Thunberg when her hobgoblin was environmental apocalypticism, the state of Israel still possesses enough self-confidence to stand up for itself.
Last week, Thunberg set off in a dinghy bound for the Gaza Strip — an unimaginative attempt to reprise the humanitarian “flotilla” gambit Israel’s opponents attempt whenever Jerusalem makes inroads in the effort to degrade Hamas’s offensive capabilities. She promoted the trip as an effort to expose the “genocide” Israel was supposedly engineering in Gaza, but the reception she received illustrates the delusion at the heart of her activism.
As Thunberg’s boat approached the exclusion zone Israel established around the live-fire zone in which its soldiers and sailors are operating, the crew received a variety of warnings to go no further. Those warnings were ignored. Thus, the ship, which Israeli officials deliciously refer to as the “selfie yacht,” was boarded. In a conspicuously un-genocidal fashion, Israeli forces filmed themselves offering the ship’s detainees life jackets, water, and pre-packaged meals — a scene that cast into doubt pre-recorded statements from Thunberg’s group alleging that they had all been “kidnapped” by the Israeli military.
“The Madleen was carrying only a symbolic amount of humanitarian assistance,” the New York Times confessed, “an amount the Israeli foreign ministry dismissed as ‘tiny’ in its statement, and ‘less than a single truckload of aid.’”
The Times means for its readers to take this claim with a grain of salt. A variety of dubious suppositions meant to imply Israeli perfidy precede it. Among them, the notion that Gaza is on “the brink of famine” because Isreal denies food aid to Hamas (not that Hamas is holding food aid hostage, as evidence by Palestinian efforts to liberate it at great personal risk) and the claim that the U.S.-Israel “aid delivery system” “has been marred by violence” — an allegation that journalistic institutions keep having to retract every time they attempt to allege that Israel is to blame for that violence.
Thunberg and her compatriots will be deported back to Europe soon enough, but perhaps not before they are made to wallow in their own contemptible moral blindness. In a statement, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he would force the yachters to watch the full 43-minute video of the atrocities Hamas terrorists carried out during the 10/7 massacre.
“It’s appropriate that Greta the antisemite and her Hamas-supporting friends should see exactly who is the terror group Hamas that they support and act on behalf of,” the statement read, “what atrocious acts they carried out on women, the elderly and kids, and who Israel is fighting for its defense against.”
That’s not a bad idea, not that it is likely to shape the reasoning to which these activists are committed. Their highest aspiration is to make a great spectacle of themselves in service to whatever cause generates the most traction among the bourgeois radical set at any given moment. Yesterday, it was climate change. Today, it’s Israel. Tomorrow, it will be automation, austerity, or the excesses of local law enforcement. All we can be sure of is that the fundaments of the Western legal and political tradition will be in the dock. The West is, always and forever, the bad guy.
Whatever discomfort Thunberg experiences as a result of her uninformed agitation, it will prove cold comfort. The adulation and funding she will receive from the political dilettantes to whom she caters will prove more than compensatory. But we can take some measure of solace in the degree to which Thunberg and company are being forced to reconcile their blinkered worldview with the reality they’re encountering right now. It will have to suffice for a comeuppance — at least, until Thunberg and her ilk take their protest-flavored performance art too far.