Greta Thunberg – still making all the right enemies

They say she is using ‘the climate movement to throw her support behind the Palestinians’. Well, good on her.
Thunberg likely understood that from the moment the then-15- year-old Swedish schoolgirl embarked on her silent, solitary protest warning of the impending climate apocalypse that she would invite a swarm of hysterical detractors who, in defence of the agreeable status quo, were conditioned to question her motives and sincerity...

...“If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist,” Thunberg said in Milan, Italy, this month during a rally demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza.

“Silence is complicity,” Thunberg added. “You cannot be neutral in a genocide.”...

...In a lengthy yarn in the international edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, a host of reporters marshalled their resources late last year to pen a thinly disguised “hit” piece designed, once again, to put Thunberg in her place – all with the patina of sober Teutonic seriousness.

I have read it, so you don’t have to.

The essay oozes with the grating condescension and sloppy accusations of a gallery of English-speaking hacks that I addressed in this 2019 column.

The Der Spiegel writers begin with this patronising nugget. “[Thunberg] is no longer a girl. … Rather, she looks like a self-confident, 20-year-old woman.”

Oh, how sweet of her.

The “shy” girl turned “self-confident” woman was credited with speaking “uncomfortable truths” about the climate crisis to popes, presidents and prime ministers.

“But she was right,” Der Spiegel wrote. “And she had science on her side.”

Oh, how sweet of her – part two.

“Now”, Der Spiegel wrote, Thunberg “finds herself on the business end of serious, justified criticism” for having carried out the blasphemy of using “the climate movement to throw her support behind the Palestinians”.

Oh, how horrible of her.

Thunberg’s “recurring pattern” of defending the Palestinian cause has, according to Der Spiegel, triggered “dismay” and sown division among her disappointed followers, particularly in Germany, and on “the left” who once admired her.

Oh, how horrible of her – part two.

Still, Der Spiegel allows that “Thunberg does feel empathy – for the Palestinians. And that’s not wrong.”

I suspect that Thunberg doesn’t require Der Spiegel’s approval to “feel empathy – for the Palestinians”.

Apparently, Thunberg is no longer a youthful upstart who shares “uncomfortable truths” but a “propagandist” by virtue of her “cold” and distant “approach to Israel”.

The saint has become a “naive” sinner – even though, this time, she has history and international law, not science, on her side.

The remainder of Der Spiegel’s largely uncharitable “deep dive” into Thunberg’s present and past recycles the familiar tropes.

She was an unhappy, stubborn child whose awkwardness alienated friends and triggered 40-minute-long tantrums.

As such, her advocacy on behalf of besieged Palestinians, Der Spiegel speculates, is borne of her longing for the “respect of her peers” and to “be recognized”.

It is absurd tripe.

As I wrote more than five years ago: “[Thunberg] disdains celebrity. She makes no claim to heroism. She rebuffs efforts to idolise her. She isn’t calculating or preoccupied with fame or ego. There is no artifice about her. She speaks plainly, without affectation or embroidery.”

Thunberg’s rallying to the aid of Palestinians is a natural extension of her undeniable instinct to confront the profound human repercussions of ignorance and complacency and to do something about it – alone, if necessary.

It is the signature impulse that has driven her extraordinary activism from the start.

She has never insisted that others follow her lead in lockstep. Yet legions have because they are moved by the same impulse to confront the profound human repercussions of ignorance and complacency and to do something about it.

I’m confident that Thunberg will continue to reject Der Spiegel’s trite admonition to get back “on the right track”.

She has been there all along.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/10/22/greta-thunberg-still-making-all-the-right-enemies