Twist and shout
Why does the mention of Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate change-turned-pro-Palestine activist, get the panties of so many white (and those with pretensions to whiteness) men in a twist? Piers Morgan for one. They label her activism performative, dismiss her actions as stunts, and portray her as an attention-seeking opportunist riding on the coattails of some cause or another.
Not just white men, mind you, but even all of the white so-called feminists who waste no time clamoring for the liberation of Afghan/Iranian/(insert Global South nation here whose resources the West is itching to extract and control) women under cruel subjugation by medieval and unenlightened leaders who trample on their human rights.
Yet when one of their own, someone who, by their own measure, embodies the qualities they loudly extol—confidence, compassion, intelligence, and integrity—is kidnapped whilst on a humanitarian mission by a foreign military power on international waters and taken to prison where she is tortured, these self-declared foghorns of democracy are deafeningly silent.
Not a word, not a sound
Where is the outrage? Seriously, why aren’t these people up in arms at this display of inhumanity toward someone who shares the same melanin deficiency as they do?
One would think these defenders of freedom would be rushing to condemn Israel for this blatant bulldozing of international law (not surprising, really, when you consider that bulldozing Palestinians and their homes is part of the Israeli arsenal of genocide in Gaza), as well as for the flagrant abuse of human rights. Other activists from the humanitarian Global Sumud Flotilla who were taken captive by Israel witnessed Thunberg’s mistreatment, recounting that she was beaten, dragged on the ground, and, bizarrely, made to kiss the Israeli flag while unlawfully detained.
But the West, of course, never calls out its allies, especially one it is actively supplying with bombs, aircraft, and intel in the wholesale extermination of an Indigenous people.
Thunberg was not the only white woman from the flotilla to experience this degradation. Activist Yvonne Ridley, 67, a former Welsh newspaper editor once kidnapped by the Taliban, declared, when she was released from Israeli custody, that she would rather spend two months in a Taliban jail than two days in an Israeli prison.
Such a strong condemnation should have elicited, one would assume, stringent denials from the Western establishment; after all, their nemesis, the Taliban, has long been the poster child of oppression and cruelty.
But not a word. Liberal hypocrisy, is that you? Why the double standard?
Equal opportunity sadists
It wasn’t just the white women (and men) who were subject to torture—including the deprivation of food and water as well as medication—whilst being held in Israeli prisons. The Israeli military, after all, is an equal opportunity sadist. Muslim hostages from Malaysia and South Africa have reported being strip-searched, their hijabs torn from their heads in the presence of men. One woman, Fatima Hendricks, said they received harsher treatment when the military found they were South African; as a breast cancer survivor, she said her mastectomy scars were even exposed and mocked by her captors.
But the West doesn’t really care about them; they’re not white, for one, and they come from the country that filed the case against Israel, and by extension, its complicit allies, in the International Court of Justice.
Yet all the hostages, regardless of gender, have insisted that the issue is not about them. It is Gaza, and the torture they were subjected to was only a fraction of the torture Palestinian detainees are regularly meted out as they languish in Israeli jails—many without formal charges, under the nebula of administrative detention.
And I suppose this is part of the problem the West has with Thunberg and other white female activists. In sticking steadfastly to the cause, they refuse to center themselves, the very opposite of the individual-as-brand approach, the self-absorbed look-at-me media whoring prevalent these days.
The wrong kind of blonde
The erstwhile international darling who at 16 confronted the world and demanded the powers-that-be take concrete actions to protect the Earth for future generations, Thunberg could have had a cushy life doing the Davos and TED Talk route, hobnobbing with the likes of Hilary Clinton and all these “global thought leaders” who really are, at the end of the day, instruments of imperialism milking the system that was created to keep them entrenched in power and wealth.
But she saw through the artifice of liberalism fairly quickly and understood that to be a climate activist is to be an advocate for climate justice. One cannot claim to care about the environment when one country is dropping the equivalent of over 100,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, uprooting its olive trees, cutting off food and water, and poisoning its wells, among others.
Her identification with the cause of the Palestinians basically nipped any aspirations to speaking engagements at $100,000-a-plate benefit galas with the world’s movers and shakers (for a list of names, see the Epstein files).
Not that she was ever about that life. There’s Malala for that.
And, because we live in a society where looks matter, Thunberg is the wrong kind of blonde. She’s cute, but not glamorous or even conventionally pretty. She is frank, disconcertingly so for some, and doesn’t smile or giggle coyly or feign performative concern for an audience drowning in its own liberal delusions that it constantly congratulates itself for caring about the world, reciting daily affirmations while children are literally being starved and sliced in half by bombs.
There’s Taylor Swift for that.
