In early April, an offshoot of the Just Stop Oil eco-activist group calling themselves Youth Demand descended upon the London HQ of the UK Labour Party and sprayed it all over with red paint. Its occupants had “blood on their hands”, they said. Apparently, the Labour Party, who are highly likely to form the next British Government come the General Election due later this year, were “threatening to continue [committing] genocide” once they were in office.
I didn’t realise they were committing it already.
What on earth was the Labour Party doing? For one thing, said Youth Demand, by failing to demand an immediate end to fossil fuel drilling across the nation, Labour was allegedly helping “kill hundreds of millions” thanks to climate change. But, equally, by failing to promise to call time on UK arms sales to Israel, Labour’s Shadow Cabinet was likewise facilitating the “mass murder” of innocent civilians (and equally innocent Hamas terrorists, no doubt) over in Gaza.
This conflation of environmentalism with the Israel-Gaza war does seem a rather strange campaigning tactic as the two issues have precisely nothing to do with one another. To link the two in only raises the danger of putting off people from supporting one of your causes by virtue of them not supporting the other one. It’s like a march upon Whitehall to demand the Government not only legalise cannabis immediately, and at the same time bring back hanging.
Some people may support Net Zero but also support Israel. Some people may support Hamas, but regard global warming as a hoax (I think in particular of Piers Corbyn, the crankish brother of former Far-Left Labour Party leader Jeremy). To risk splitting public support like this makes little political sense. Why not separate the two issues of Gaza and climate, as they should be?
How green is my Jordan Valley?
Ever since Hamas’ pogrom against Israel last October 7, Greens across the West have been having a similar heated debate. The movement’s current chief global figurehead, Greta Thunberg, everyone’s favourite Swedish apocalypse goblin, has been much criticised for engaging in needless stunts conflating environmentalism and Zionism.
The controversy has been particularly strong in Germany, where Green leaders from Greta’s own movement, the Fridays for Future school-strike organisation, felt compelled to put out a statement distancing themselves from her views, and reiterating their support for Israel’s right to exist. For obvious historical reasons, the accusation of anti-Semitism is one most mainstream figures in Germany are careful to avoid …
The November 18th edition of Germany’s leading news weekly, Der Spiegel, ran a lengthy article criticising Thunberg’s apparent Hamas-wards turn, accusing her of creating a “potential schism” within the Green movement. This investigation featured interviews with other young climate activists who had suddenly begun talking much more about saving the Gazans than saving the whales.
One 22-year-old Finnish activist featured, Ida Korhonen, openly admitted she had only really heard of the Israel-Palestine conflict a few weeks beforehand, boasting she got all of her information about the issue “from social networks, from Amnesty [International] and from Palestinian journalists on the scene.” What had such completely unbiased sources allowed Ida to discover? That Green activists “shouldn’t be talking about ourselves [i.e., our main actual cause of environmentalism] anymore, but only about Palestine … War against people is also always war against nature … There can be no [climate] justice without an end to the genocide against the Palestinians.”
What a Greta big fool
Greta Thunberg evidently agreed. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel, she too had become an instant expert on the whole issue, posting tweets standing alongside fellow juvenile activists holding signs saying performatively progressive things like ‘STAND WITH GAZA’, ‘FREE PALESTINE’ and ‘CLIMATE JUSTICE NOW!’ (as well as posing with a supposedly ‘anti-Semitic octopus’ cuddly toy, but that’s another story).
Week 270. Today we strike in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza. The world needs to speak up and call for an immediate ceasefire, justice and freedom for Palestinians and all civilians affected.#FreePalestine #IStandWithPalestine #StandWithGaza #FridaysForFutureThread🧵 pic.twitter.com/0hVtya0yWO— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) October 20, 2023
As a result of such provocation, the Israeli Education Ministry dropped all mention of the fallen child saint from their national curriculum for schools: I would question why she had ever been on it in the first place.
Yet, as so often, still Greta refused to shut up. In December, together with three other equally insufferable-sounding Swedish Fridays for Future activists, she penned an op-ed in the UK’s leading left-wing newspaper The Guardian, entitled ‘We won’t stop speaking out about Gaza’s suffering – there is no climate justice without human rights’.
Here, she took her critics to task for saying that, by talking about this new and separate issue, she was only damaging their wider original cause, cautioning that “Silence is complicity. You cannot be neutral in an unfolding genocide.”
Greta’s rationale here ran as follows:
“Despite these horrors [the alleged ‘genocide’ being perpetrated by Israel in the region], some have chosen to focus the public debate on attempts to delegitimise statements about Gaza made by young people in the climate justice movement. Contrary to what many have claimed, Fridays for Future has not ‘been radicalised’ or ‘become political’. We have always been political, because we have always been a movement for justice. Standing in solidarity with Palestinians and all affected civilians has never been in question for us. Advocating for climate justice fundamentally comes from a place of caring about people and their human rights. That means speaking up when people suffer, are forced to flee their homes or are killed – regardless of the cause.”
As if to ram home just how woke she now was, Thunberg ended her piece by ritually citing her pronouns (“she/her”, in case you were wondering – hardly surprising, as she is a female).