By Noah Rothman
Monday, June 09, 2025
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.
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