Sweden’s prophetess of doom is back in the news. She’s making waves with her plan to sail to Gaza. She and others from the turbo-smug keffiyeh classes had planned to sail on a boat called – wait for it – Conscience. Rumour has it they called it that because ‘Aren’t We F*****g Wonderful?’ was too long for the hull. But their moral expedition has been put on hold after a drone fired on their boat in waters off Malta, causing damage but no casualties.
Information is sparse. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) that’s organising this virtue-fest in the Med says 30 people were onboard at the time – the Maltese government says 16 were. Greta says Israel fired the drone, yet another ‘crystal-clear example’ that it doesn’t give a toss about ‘international law and human rights’; Israel is staying schtum.
Of course, no one wants to see Greta or her activist pals come to any harm. I’m glad that they haven’t. Yet it would be wholly wrong to describe this expedition as merely about delivering aid, as simply humanitarian. The aim of these seafaring Israelophobes is less to ‘help Gaza’ than to weaken Israel’s hold over the enemy territory it has seized in its bloody war with Hamas.
The FFC is open about its desire to interfere with Israel’s war effort. It says it wants to ‘break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza’. So this isn’t just about handing food boxes to hungry Gazans – it’s about frustrating Israel’s encircling of Gaza as it hunts down the army of anti-Semites that butchered more than a thousand people on 7 October 2023.
The flotilla openly fashions itself as a manifestation of ‘international law’. We have every right to ‘break the siege of Gaza’, the organisers say, because ‘recent International Court of Justice orders’ have made it clear that ‘states must not obstruct humanitarian aid delivery’. So they’re less aid bringers than mercenary bailiffs, come to enforce the ‘orders’ of a globalist court against what they view as a wicked nation. These aren’t peace campaigners – they’re the activist wing of the new elites. There isn’t a keffiyeh big enough to disguise that these faux radicals are actually doing the bidding of unaccountable courts that have damned Israel’s war as potentially genocidal.
People talk about the siege of Gaza but few are prepared to reckon with the siege of Israel. For years, the Jewish State has been subjected to a double siege. There’s the physical siege by the armies of anti-Semites that surround it and which dream of its obliteration. And there’s the moral siege by the intellectuals of the West. By our credentialed classes, our activist set, our literary elites, all of whom increasingly derive their fantasy of virtue from their hostility to the Jewish nation. And some of whom also dream of its destruction. ‘From the river to sea’, they cry, to let the world know that their utopia is a Middle East with no Jewish homeland.
It’s a pincer movement of bigotry, a hippy-Islamist nexus of contempt for the world’s only Jewish state. Both the military siege of Israel by Iran’s deranged proxies and the moral siege of it by the West’s post-civilisational left speaks to this century’s crisis of Enlightenment. It should horrify everyone who believes in reason that neo-fascist regressives like Hamas don’t only still exist but also win the sympathy of many of the educated of the West. What the Greta flotilla threatened to do was make the activist class’s moral siege of Israel into something more physical. They wouldn’t be breaking a siege but intensifying one.
Blockades have been a tactic of every war in history. They’re a key means of depriving the enemy of the ability to rearm and refortify. Greta and her chums couldn’t break a big stick far less a military siege, I know. But that they desire to weaken Israel’s siege of a piece of land ruled by a fascist militia that murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis is chilling. There’s a war between the democratic Jewish State and a medieval militia that was founded to kill Jews, and the West’s activist class continually says and does things that benefit the latter more than the former. Never forget how unusual that is, how horrendous.
Greta has jumped from the green bandwagon to the anti-Israel bandwagon, her critics say. I think she’s been consistent. For climate-change alarmism and Israelophobia share something important in common – a haughty weariness with modernity. A doom-mongering built more on bigotry than truth in which either industrious mankind or evil Israel is always on the cusp of destroying humanity. That the West’s youthful End is Nigh hysterics have now taken the wrong side in an existential clash between a modern state and a barbarous militia should not surprise us. It should worry us, though – enormously.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
Information is sparse. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) that’s organising this virtue-fest in the Med says 30 people were onboard at the time – the Maltese government says 16 were. Greta says Israel fired the drone, yet another ‘crystal-clear example’ that it doesn’t give a toss about ‘international law and human rights’; Israel is staying schtum.
Of course, no one wants to see Greta or her activist pals come to any harm. I’m glad that they haven’t. Yet it would be wholly wrong to describe this expedition as merely about delivering aid, as simply humanitarian. The aim of these seafaring Israelophobes is less to ‘help Gaza’ than to weaken Israel’s hold over the enemy territory it has seized in its bloody war with Hamas.
The FFC is open about its desire to interfere with Israel’s war effort. It says it wants to ‘break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza’. So this isn’t just about handing food boxes to hungry Gazans – it’s about frustrating Israel’s encircling of Gaza as it hunts down the army of anti-Semites that butchered more than a thousand people on 7 October 2023.
The flotilla openly fashions itself as a manifestation of ‘international law’. We have every right to ‘break the siege of Gaza’, the organisers say, because ‘recent International Court of Justice orders’ have made it clear that ‘states must not obstruct humanitarian aid delivery’. So they’re less aid bringers than mercenary bailiffs, come to enforce the ‘orders’ of a globalist court against what they view as a wicked nation. These aren’t peace campaigners – they’re the activist wing of the new elites. There isn’t a keffiyeh big enough to disguise that these faux radicals are actually doing the bidding of unaccountable courts that have damned Israel’s war as potentially genocidal.
People talk about the siege of Gaza but few are prepared to reckon with the siege of Israel. For years, the Jewish State has been subjected to a double siege. There’s the physical siege by the armies of anti-Semites that surround it and which dream of its obliteration. And there’s the moral siege by the intellectuals of the West. By our credentialed classes, our activist set, our literary elites, all of whom increasingly derive their fantasy of virtue from their hostility to the Jewish nation. And some of whom also dream of its destruction. ‘From the river to sea’, they cry, to let the world know that their utopia is a Middle East with no Jewish homeland.
It’s a pincer movement of bigotry, a hippy-Islamist nexus of contempt for the world’s only Jewish state. Both the military siege of Israel by Iran’s deranged proxies and the moral siege of it by the West’s post-civilisational left speaks to this century’s crisis of Enlightenment. It should horrify everyone who believes in reason that neo-fascist regressives like Hamas don’t only still exist but also win the sympathy of many of the educated of the West. What the Greta flotilla threatened to do was make the activist class’s moral siege of Israel into something more physical. They wouldn’t be breaking a siege but intensifying one.
Blockades have been a tactic of every war in history. They’re a key means of depriving the enemy of the ability to rearm and refortify. Greta and her chums couldn’t break a big stick far less a military siege, I know. But that they desire to weaken Israel’s siege of a piece of land ruled by a fascist militia that murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis is chilling. There’s a war between the democratic Jewish State and a medieval militia that was founded to kill Jews, and the West’s activist class continually says and does things that benefit the latter more than the former. Never forget how unusual that is, how horrendous.
Greta has jumped from the green bandwagon to the anti-Israel bandwagon, her critics say. I think she’s been consistent. For climate-change alarmism and Israelophobia share something important in common – a haughty weariness with modernity. A doom-mongering built more on bigotry than truth in which either industrious mankind or evil Israel is always on the cusp of destroying humanity. That the West’s youthful End is Nigh hysterics have now taken the wrong side in an existential clash between a modern state and a barbarous militia should not surprise us. It should worry us, though – enormously.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
9 comments:
Simple - there’s zero mileage in Sudan (or Dubai for that matter) where gross human right violations and exploitations occur.
I hope Greta isn't accompanied by any 'Queers for Palestine' - she would soon learn what real trouble is probably within an hour of making landfall there!
Ms Thunberg should be advised just how much better her cause would be served by a small, uneducated martyr.
Why am I still reading about this non-entity?
This labored and ongoing focus on someone with no talent or expertise is like one of those inane reality television shows.
They could have got a trained poodle or chimpanzee to front whatever campaign it is all about.
When Shirley Temple grew up and the Hollywood studios lost interest in their child star, at least through her own efforts she later forged a diplomatic career.
I just am completed baffled how the media seems to make a modern-day Joan of Arc out of nothing.
You are one of my favourite foreign correspondents Brendan but we must beg to differ on one particular comment in this latest piece.
Given her deliberate choice of puting herself in harm’s way, virtually goading the Israelis to react to her pipsqueak interference on the wrong side of history,
she deserves everything she gets.
In fact, l would go further and ask how long should we wait before the world wakes up to the fact that the Gaza War is gone beyond the point of no return.
The only thing delaying a permanent ceasefire and peace is the woke support for these terrorists and their civilian counterparts like Greta Thunberg.
Enough!
Can we also have Chloe, marama, bussy Doyle, Ricky and their fellow misfits in parliament, while brandishing their black and white table cloths show a skerrick of the courage of their convictions and join the child-eco warrior on that boat bound for Gaza? No great loss if the vessel is holed by a drone in mid-Mediterranean.
To Anon @ 10:18 AM 9 May - you forgot to add " and look at what the French did to Joan of Arc, after all her valiant efforts to ..."
Oliver Cromwell, was a Man of His Times, sadly, the then King, had a different view.
Greta should follow Masih Alinejad on X (regarding human rights in Iran)
Poor Greta is supposedly somewhere on the asperges syndrome spectrum , which means she is incapable of considering other view points.
Hamas took much of the food and supplies to feed themselves and sell on the black market to finance their infrastructure of war .
Israeli defense forces are now overseeing food distribution in Southern Gaza to stop Hamas stealing it.
The United Nations doesn't support this demonstrating that its aim is not to alleviate Gazan suffering but to aid Hamasin its war against Israel.
Marxist views of the media, academia and others sees Israel as a colonial oppressor. starving children and committing war crimes in Gaza .
The UN, the international legal tribunals and the entire humanitarian establishment are gripped by an epidemic denial of reason. Similar to Greta.
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