Greta Thunberg is grifting at sea. The moonfaced Swedish malcontent and 11 other Hamas supporters left the Sicilian port of Catania on the Madleen on the morning of June 1, destination Gaza. If, that is, the Israelis let them land. Thunberg is an old salt. On May 1, technical difficulties ended the environmentalist elf’s first attempt to enter a war zone in support of Islamists on a ship chartered by and for Islamists. The technical difficulties seem to have been a drone attack, which blew open the front of the boat a few hours after it set off from Malta.
At the time of writing, the Madleen is in Greek waters. Some people say, sink the ship of fools before they get to Gaza. I say, let ‘em in. Thunberg won’t be chained up in a tunnel or tortured, starved, and beaten. Should the Madleen dock where Gaza used to have a port, Hamas will receive her with ceremony as a valued ally and useful idiot.
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The value of images has never been so high. The uses of idiocy have never been so various. Look at who is using Thunberg, and we see how our media is doing our enemies’ work.
The Madleen’s mission is a media stunt, so the media returns the compliment. Lots of pictures of Thunberg, troll-like in a crisp keffiyeh, and a few of Irish actor Liam Cunningham, who knows all about geopolitics from doing a stint in Game of Thrones. No pictures of Thiago Àvila, a Brazilian “activist” who attended the funeral of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut in February. No mention of the organizers, either. But it’s not hard to find out who’s floating Thunberg’s boat. All you need is an internet connection. That Western media don’t look into this tells us much about their ethical collapse—not into irrelevance, but into active hostility to their own societies.
The organizers include Zaher Birawi, a Palestinian who lives in London and was described in the British Parliament in 2023 as a “senior Hamas operative in Europe.” There’s Dylan Saba, the Palestinian American lawyer who, while the barbarities of Oct. 7, 2023, were still ongoing, posted, “Glory to the resistance and the people of Palestine. … I could not be more proud of my people.” Don’t forget the charming Huwaida Arraf, the Islamic Jihad admirer who co-founded the pro-terrorism International Solidarity Movement, which was, NGO Monitor reports, set up by the Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees, which was co-led by Kamal Obeid who, wait for it, is a board member of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. And let’s not forget mad-lib Medea Benjamin, the American co-founder of Code Pink, a group funded by China.
Nor do American media look into the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which organizes the voyage. The FFC claims to be a “grassroots people-to-people solidarity movement.” It’s not. The FFC’s people-to-people connection is between the Islamist nutjobs who lead a Turkish charity with the parodic name of the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, or IHH, and a web of mostly European nongovernmental organizations that exist in a similarly sinister bubble of mild-sounding mania.
In 2010, when the FFC launched its first IHH-backed ship to Gaza and the New York Times still practiced journalism, it described IHH as so close to then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist AK party that it was a “GNGO”: a governmental nongovernmental organization. Jean-Louis Bruguière, who led the French judiciary’s counterterrorism unit until 2007, confirmed that IHH had “clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and jihad,” including helping al Qaida when Osama bin Laden “started to want to target U.S. soil.”
IHH is a member of the Union of the Good, a Saudi Arabia-based network which the United States designated in 2008 as “an organization created by the Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization.” Maître Bruguière must have choked on his morning croissant when he read that IHH’s partners in the 2015 Gaza flotilla included the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine, a network of over 40 anti-Israel NGOs whose members contain more fellow travelers with Islamism than a BBC drinks party.
THE UNITED NATIONS IS STILL AIDING HAMAS
Maître Bruguière wouldn’t have read it on the Freedom Flotilla’s website because it didn’t mention it. In 2015, however, the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine was midway through a three-year grant from the French Development Agency — another GNGO.
A GNGO is a logical impossibility: An NGO is nothing if it is not nongovernmental. Thunberg is merely a logical absurdity, the possibly terminal product of a civilization adrift on the waves: a 22-year-old cosplaying as a child savant, a post-Christian tree-hugger fronting for Islamists, a feminist campaigning for the world’s top misogynists, a humanitarian working for terrorists, a moralizing meme boosted by an immoral media. The evil currents that carry Thunberg to Gaza also swirl in our streets and societies. How are we going to turn the ship around? If we don’t, we’re sunk.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.