The Israelis know how to deport people. If this had been Britain, Greta Thunberg would be sitting in an asylum hotel right now, using a taxpayer-funded mobile phone, working as a Deliveroo driver and gearing up for 20 years of legal battles that will line the pockets of human rights lawyers.
Good riddance, I say. My only regret is that Thunberg refused to watch the footage of October 7 at a screening provided by the Israeli authorities before she was sent back where she came from. Such are the reports, anyway. In an episode rich with irony, this was the turkey in the challah sandwich (provided to the activist by Israeli commandos upon arrival).
First there was the voyage itself, which, as the Telegraph reveals, was organised by Zaher Birawi, who has been described in Parliament as having links with Hamas. Says it all, doesn’t it?
Intentionally or not, some of the loudest defenders of human rights turn out to be doing the bidding of Hamas. Of course, if Thunberg had made it to Gaza, the aid would likely have been seized by Hamas and sold to pay their jihadis, when the Israelis are providing food for free. In terms of irony, you can’t get much better than that.
Or so we thought. When the so-called “selfie yacht” was picked up by the Israeli navy – which might have had more important things to do, you’d have thought – in what has been dubbed the “softest military operation in history” – they have range, the Israelis, I’ll give them that – it was found to contain less than one truckful of aid. Over the last 18 months, the genocidal Israelis have facilitated an influx of more than 92,000 trucks into the Strip. The irony!
Again, this told us everything we needed to know. But then we were hit by a further one-two of irony that was almost crippling: the activists were found to have consumed quite a lot of the aid on their voyage, according to Israeli authorities, but were still rather peckish.
Hence that famous picture of Thunberg in her froggy sunhat gratefully receiving a kosher sandwich from a soldier, several years younger than her, who was doing something honourable with his life. What’s Hebrew for thank you? Toda raba.
Enough! Enough! I’m in danger of hyperventilating over here. Amid malicious allegations of starvation in Gaza, a Swedish child accepts a snack from a supposed genocidaire after apparently scoffing much of the ineffectual aid herself, which would only have supported jihadism anyway, but was good for the selfies. It is all painfully 2025.
But there was more: in a selfie video apparently recorded some time beforehand, in which she was seen culturally appropriating a Palestinian keffiyeh – I bet she’d never dream of wearing a sombrero – Thunberg claimed to have been “kidnapped” by the “Israeli occupational forces”. How she kept a straight face, knowing that the Israeli hostages had been languishing in the jihadi dungeons underground for more than a year-and-a-half, one can only guess.
In a further layer of the good stuff, her call for followers to pressure the Swedish government to free her from Israeli “captivity” provoked so many calls to the emergency hotlines to help Swedes abroad that those truly in need of assistance were unable to get it. But who cares? The selfies won’t share themselves, after all.
There was a glimmer of good sense when Israel offered to provide some education to the activist, who had famously abandoned her free schooling at the age of 15. You care so much about suffering? Come and watch what happened on October 7. Be educated. But now we hear that she refused to do so. Closing her eyes to the reality of what caused this war in the first place, and what continues to perpetuate it today? Priceless.
It was typical of the global effort to erase the casus belli of this conflict and rewrite history to make the victims the aggressors, the victims of attempted genocide the perpetrators of the same crime, the people who had their babies murdered the true baby killers. To be fair to Thunberg, she’s hardly the only person at it.
This week, our most distinguished foreign correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, produced a major piece of journalism – journalism? – which was criticised by the Board of Deputies as containing “unacceptable bias”, as it “seemed not to consider the Hamas war crimes which started and sustain this conflict,” not to mention the gratuitous Holocaust references. For shame.
If we are facing a monstrous NGO-media-digital industrial complex of propaganda, in which Bowen commands the broadcast arm, Thunberg is the brigadier general of its activist wing. In fact, her transition – may I use that word? – from climate campaigner to Gaza obsessive has been as revealing as it is opportunistic.
The juncture between the two identities was quite amusing: for a while, she was chanting “no climate justice on occupied land”, as if the top priority for Hamas was a net zero policy. (Not that Gaza has been “occupied” since 2005, but you know what she means.) Then she simply jettisoned the climate guff, which was feeling rather dated, and went full keffiyeh. Identified as a Gaza campaigner, I suppose.
Let’s stop beating around the selfie yacht. It was never truly about the climate, any more than it was truly about the conflict in the Middle East. Closing her eyes to the October 7 footage crystallised the sustaining principle of Greta Thunberg: she is absorbed in a world of her own. It is a world that began with hating her teachers; went on to hating the establishment; and has ended with hating the Jews and the West, powered by endless selfies.
This spectacular teenage tantrum is most often indulged by people like Gary Lineker, like Dawn French, like Jeremy Bowen, like Thunberg herself, who all supposedly left their teenage years behind a long time ago.
While Israel’s youngsters were murdered at the Nova festival and are putting their lives on the line daily for their country, enduring unbelievable quantities of hatred and bigotry around the world, their greatest critics have never grown up themselves. That’s the final irony.
The Israelis know how to deport people. If this had been Britain, Greta Thunberg would be sitting in an asylum hotel right now, using a taxpayer-funded mobile phone, working as a Deliveroo driver and gearing up for 20 years of legal battles that will line the pockets of human rights lawyers.
Good riddance, I say. My only regret is that Thunberg refused to watch the footage of October 7 at a screening provided by the Israeli authorities before she was sent back where she came from. Such are the reports, anyway. In an episode rich with irony, this was the turkey in the challah sandwich (provided to the activist by Israeli commandos upon arrival).
First there was the voyage itself, which, as the Telegraph reveals, was organised by Zaher Birawi, who has been described in Parliament as having links with Hamas. Says it all, doesn’t it?
Intentionally or not, some of the loudest defenders of human rights turn out to be doing the bidding of Hamas. Of course, if Thunberg had made it to Gaza, the aid would likely have been seized by Hamas and sold to pay their jihadis, when the Israelis are providing food for free. In terms of irony, you can’t get much better than that.
Or so we thought. When the so-called “selfie yacht” was picked up by the Israeli navy – which might have had more important things to do, you’d have thought – in what has been dubbed the “softest military operation in history” – they have range, the Israelis, I’ll give them that – it was found to contain less than one truckful of aid. Over the last 18 months, the genocidal Israelis have facilitated an influx of more than 92,000 trucks into the Strip. The irony!
Again, this told us everything we needed to know. But then we were hit by a further one-two of irony that was almost crippling: the activists were found to have consumed quite a lot of the aid on their voyage, according to Israeli authorities, but were still rather peckish.
Hence that famous picture of Thunberg in her froggy sunhat gratefully receiving a kosher sandwich from a soldier, several years younger than her, who was doing something honourable with his life. What’s Hebrew for thank you? Toda raba.
Enough! Enough! I’m in danger of hyperventilating over here. Amid malicious allegations of starvation in Gaza, a Swedish child accepts a snack from a supposed genocidaire after apparently scoffing much of the ineffectual aid herself, which would only have supported jihadism anyway, but was good for the selfies. It is all painfully 2025.
But there was more: in a selfie video apparently recorded some time beforehand, in which she was seen culturally appropriating a Palestinian keffiyeh – I bet she’d never dream of wearing a sombrero – Thunberg claimed to have been “kidnapped” by the “Israeli occupational forces”. How she kept a straight face, knowing that the Israeli hostages had been languishing in the jihadi dungeons underground for more than a year-and-a-half, one can only guess.
In a further layer of the good stuff, her call for followers to pressure the Swedish government to free her from Israeli “captivity” provoked so many calls to the emergency hotlines to help Swedes abroad that those truly in need of assistance were unable to get it. But who cares? The selfies won’t share themselves, after all.
There was a glimmer of good sense when Israel offered to provide some education to the activist, who had famously abandoned her free schooling at the age of 15. You care so much about suffering? Come and watch what happened on October 7. Be educated. But now we hear that she refused to do so. Closing her eyes to the reality of what caused this war in the first place, and what continues to perpetuate it today? Priceless.
It was typical of the global effort to erase the casus belli of this conflict and rewrite history to make the victims the aggressors, the victims of attempted genocide the perpetrators of the same crime, the people who had their babies murdered the true baby killers. To be fair to Thunberg, she’s hardly the only person at it.
This week, our most distinguished foreign correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, produced a major piece of journalism – journalism? – which was criticised by the Board of Deputies as containing “unacceptable bias”, as it “seemed not to consider the Hamas war crimes which started and sustain this conflict,” not to mention the gratuitous Holocaust references. For shame.
If we are facing a monstrous NGO-media-digital industrial complex of propaganda, in which Bowen commands the broadcast arm, Thunberg is the brigadier general of its activist wing. In fact, her transition – may I use that word? – from climate campaigner to Gaza obsessive has been as revealing as it is opportunistic.
The juncture between the two identities was quite amusing: for a while, she was chanting “no climate justice on occupied land”, as if the top priority for Hamas was a net zero policy. (Not that Gaza has been “occupied” since 2005, but you know what she means.) Then she simply jettisoned the climate guff, which was feeling rather dated, and went full keffiyeh. Identified as a Gaza campaigner, I suppose.
Let’s stop beating around the selfie yacht. It was never truly about the climate, any more than it was truly about the conflict in the Middle East. Closing her eyes to the October 7 footage crystallised the sustaining principle of Greta Thunberg: she is absorbed in a world of her own. It is a world that began with hating her teachers; went on to hating the establishment; and has ended with hating the Jews and the West, powered by endless selfies.
This spectacular teenage tantrum is most often indulged by people like Gary Lineker, like Dawn French, like Jeremy Bowen, like Thunberg herself, who all supposedly left their teenage years behind a long time ago.
While Israel’s youngsters were murdered at the Nova festival and are putting their lives on the line daily for their country, enduring unbelievable quantities of hatred and bigotry around the world, their greatest critics have never grown up themselves. That’s the final irony.