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).
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).
Clueless in Gaza
Had Greta gone fully intersectional? Evidently so, and the whole fact was clearly rubbing some people up the wrong way.
In November, after Thunberg had invited a kaffiyeh-wearing Palestinian woman onto the stage at a climate-rally she was holding in Amsterdam, she was interrupted by a male audience member who snatched her microphone and informed her, quite reasonably, that “I’ve come here for a climate demonstration, not a political view” about a wholly irrelevant issue in the Middle East. Greta took little notice, however, seizing the microphone back before leading the crowd in a chant of the rather bizarre-sounding slogan “No climate justice on occupied land!”
What do such slogans even mean? How on earth can you have “No climate justice” for humanity so long as Israel continues to rule the roost in the Holy Land? What has global warming – or indeed the ever-pressing issue of one’s sacred pronouns – got to do with a never-ending round of ethno-religious warfare in Gaza?
Nothing, really. Nothing at all.
But that didn’t stop Greta & Co trying to lump it all in together by making an extremely spurious argument to the effect that, by daring to defend themselves against Hamas’ original attack by bombing the terrorists right back, the Israelis were massively adding to the supposedly planet-killing problem of global warming by virtue of selfishly using rockets and missiles which emitted large amounts of CO₂ from their exhausts (as if there are any other kind; did the Greens really expect the Israelis to throw their ordnance by hand, or else hurl them all from slings, David vs Goliath-style?).
But the poor quality of the logic hardly matters, as the rationale underlying such overblown conflations of climate and anti-Zionism, of pronouns and warfare, is that of so-called ‘intersectionality’, the idea that, by adding up all the causes of the world’s supposed ‘oppressed’ people together, they will gain trade union-style strength in numbers, and become unbeatable (see my deeply sceptical explanatory article on the subject here).
So, supposedly, black people, homosexuals, feminists, the disabled and the mentally ill are all natural allies. Even people you may not have previously expected to be on the same side, like, say, Islamic terrorists and transgenderists, are supposedly united as natural allies against cisgender Western imperialism, along the basic logic that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.
Such thinking seems deeply misguided to me. All too often, ‘intersectionality’ is just a ridiculous and self-defeating process which will only end up alienating as many potential supporters from a cause they might otherwise support, as it will attracting any new ones to it. I’m sure we’ve all seen cases of ostensibly worthwhile charities, like Save the Children, whose campaigns we may until recently have been sympathetic towards, who have suddenly gone right to the bottom of our future donation lists because they suddenly became less concerned with actually Saving the Children, and more bothered about chemically castrating them along rainbow activist lines instead, or lecturing us all on the ins-and-outs of utter irrelevancies like Critical Race Theory.
In an open letter to Greta Thunberg, some irritated Israeli climate activists expressed similar sentiments:
“Due to her position, when Greta addresses a different topic superficially and dismissively, it inevitably weakens the validity of her climate-related positions. People from all walks of life might think that the shallowness she displayed on the other issue could cast doubt on the seriousness and depth of her climate activism. Those with vested interests could exploit this to portray climate activists as unserious and lacking depth. Therefore, even without addressing the ethical and moral implications she ignored, Greta is no longer a role model for us in the climate change context.”
Whilst I personally might be rather glad to see the whole overexaggerated climate-cult undermined in this wholly needless way, can today’s intersectional Greens really not see that, by promoting the causes of Hamas and Palestine, they might alienate many of their natural supporters likewise? If you were a Jew living in a Western city like London or New York today, scarred as they are by weekly anti-Semitic pro-Hamas hate-marches, what would you feel more threatened by? Islamism, or a hypothetical two degree raise in the Earth’s overall global temperature by 2100? Any pious young eco-intersectionalist who suddenly came along outside a synagogue rattling her tin to save the Palestinians rather than the pandas would surely be immediately told where they could shove their donation-box.
Why can’t intersectional idiots like Greta Thunberg just let their own main ideas and causes stand or fall on their own individual merit? Perhaps it is because, all too often, they don’t actually have very much genuine individual merit to speak of?
Forward this entertaining but insightful analysis to your friends. Use the social media buttons on this page.
AUTHOR
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer whose work has appeared in print and online worldwide. The author of over ten books, mostly about fringe beliefs and eccentrics, his latest title, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science” exposes how the insane and murderous abuses of science perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets are being repeated anew today by the woke left who have now captured so many of our institutions of learning.
RELATED VIDEOS:
‘Cultural Appropriation’ Is Conveniently No Longer a Thing For the Left | TIPPING POINT
Muslim leader demanding death to homosexuals
EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
