For all the shock, grief, pain, and anger the events of October 7, 2023 caused in the civilized world, one can at least attest that it gave the dying climate movement a new purpose: to spread Israel-specific antisemitic hate. In that sense, it gave Greta Thunberg, formerly known as the child prophet of an end times sect, a new career.
Barely a day goes by that Greta—still a dwarfish and aggressively charmless creature for a 21-year old woman—is not seen in her keffiyeh shawl at some university or street protest, shouting over wagon speakers to her fellow protestors who obediently, rhythmically, but also strangely automatedly, repeat the non-sensical slogans that exhaust the intellectual landscape of their influential leader. Gone are the days of urging everyone to panic because a 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature will “kill us all”. Yes, her Tweet from 2018 that says World Will End Without Action By 2023 (now deleted, but we keep screenshots) has not aged well. Time to look for a new purpose. A woman’s gotta eat.
But shouldn’t it be considered a striking curiosity that the allegedly most serious political challenges of our time—the climate emergency, sexism, racism, various kinds of phobias (Islamo-/trans-) as well as the existence of Israel—always seem to coincide with the concerns of a mentally infirm young woman?
For Greta’s mental condition (which she openly talks about in interviews and speeches) is not at all irrelevant to her espousing certain views and particularly her way of doing it. I will return to this.
This also concerns the compatibility of Greta’s political causes. One can only conclude that where a concern for trans rights ranks equal with the felt necessity to “liberate Palestine”, the “Palestine” Greta speaks of is a fabrication.
Indeed, ever since the biggest pogrom against Jews since the end of the Holocaust, the climate/antisemitism brigades have celebrated a version of “Palestine” that only exists in the minds of affluent middle-class professionals and their aspirants. It is their own delusion of Palestine as Fantasy Island—a paradise with human rights for everyone, a haven for women, the queer and trans community, and carbon neutral on top of it all. All their anti-capitalist sloganeering has mysteriously crystallized in this obsessive-compulsive idea of “Palestine”—as though it could conjure up a palm-lined island with crystal shores. And who is obstructing Palestine from becoming this literal Heaven on Earth? Zionists.
Of course.
But where boomers in the 1980s used to harmlessly put up photo wallpaper to imagine themselves in a Caribbean paradise, the keffiyeh- and Covid mask-wearing Zoomers of 2024 hang Palestine flags on the dorm wall to imagine that nothing stands in the way of their “classless” and “inclusive” Palestine paradise but Israel. You never hear a campus activist complain about Hamas (or Hezbollah’s)—or their proxy, the UNRWA’s—cynical reckoning with civilian casualties by refusing to build bomb shelters for Gaza’s (or Lebanon’s) civilian population in a destructive war—and using the EU’s annual US $ 80 million, the US’s US $ 160 millions, and Iran’s generous 350 million US dollar funding instead to expand their military infrastructure of tunnels, artillery, and weaponry. They never ask how this is “beneficial” to Palestine or building a Palestine state. They wave Hezbollah flags and shout “We’re all Hamas”.
Palestine activists never ask how the generous international funding of Hamas is beneficial to Palestinians, because they imagine Palestine as a Fantasy Island threatened by evil Zionists.
For this delusional, upside-down world to be set in motion as a perpetuum mobile for antisemitic hate, however, Greta and her ilk have transposed a particular mental condition, originally a religion, to the “real world”: radical Manichaeism.
At the 2018 “Declaration of Rebellion” summit in London, Greta said of her Asperger’s condition (including instances of selective mutism and OCD suffered as a child) that, for her, “everything is black and white”. There are no gray shades in her worldview; and she hastened to add that “there are no grey zones when it comes to survival”. Against the background of her mental condition, this statement is not one about the world, but about her view of it. It might be objectively true that in Greta’s World, there is only black and white, yes and no, life and death, everything or nothing. But by this, nothing is said about conditions in the real world. And yet, her many followers that comprise the left-wing educated class with its corresponding professions in the media, academia and the NGO sector, take Greta Thunberg’s limited worldview as a picture of the real world.
In Greta’s World, there is only black and white, yes and no, life and death, everything or nothing. But by this, nothing is said about conditions in the real world.
Already in 1935, cultural historian Johan Huizinga described such manifestation of mental disorder as “puerilism”—an immature, infantile attitude towards society. The fanaticism such Manichaeism begets has become the lens for such “divisive” topics as Climate Change and Israel. In the end, however, the panicked prompt to “resist!” to “boycott, sanction, divest!”—a world of thought that cannot do without exclamation marks—stems from the inability to think.
Thinking entails the use of a different language: a language that reflects, a language that is capable of differentiation, a language that is not susceptible to sloganeering, a language of respect, a humorous language. It is the language of adults. Greta and her fellow campaigners do not speak it.
If we look closer, therefore, the Manichaeism of climate change fear and Israel loathing have a very objective common denominator: a cult of “once-and-for-all”, of dead-seriousness, the most accurate expression of which is an obsession with catastrophe, and more fundamentally, death. Death is not funny.
Indeed the cult of death, genocide, and mass extinction seems the common denominator for the Climate Activist movement, pro-Hamas campus activists and the jihadist military-industrial complex. Greta won’t get up in the morning for less than mass extinction or a juicy genocide. Nothing less than a satisfying death toll justifies the dystopia she both craves and seems to reject. How else can one’s obsession with the worst possible outcome be justified? Only in the face of mass deaths is one’s fanaticism redeemed. She only feels right where she belongs if she can ramble about “genocide”, “apartheid” and “colonialism”, while strangely making it sound like a Telecom Directory Assistance. Hence Greta sees death and “indiscriminate killing” everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except when it happens to the Jews.
It was not even two weeks after October 7, 2023, that Greta shared posts on social media that celebrated the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians as a “prison break” from Gaza and called the pogrom an act of “resistance” (her own tweets and likes from October 2023 have been deleted, but can be found here). Not once has she shown even the faintest signs of empathy in the face of the genocidal massacre and the abduction even of toddlers conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and others. Even a few Islamist campaigners on Piers Morgan find a word or two to condemn the massacre (if only because Piers insists on it). But not a word from Greta. And I must give her that: her complete lack of empathy seems sincere.
At least Greta’s complete lack of empathy for Jews seems sincere.
Since November, Greta has been relentlessly campaigning against Israel. The selective rage she puts forward against the only Jewish state betrays her antisemitism. This is shown, for example, in her strained attempts to demonize Israel as a fossil fuel enthusiast, while petrol nations Iran (one of the biggest producers of fossil fuels in the world), Saudi Arabia, or China, as well as their non-existent human rights policies, simply fall off her map. In early September this year, she was again show-arrested at a Copenhagen University keffiyeh-clad BDS protest, demanding the University “divest” from its exchange and ties to Israeli research, even after it had transpired that, via scholarly exchange, Israel and Denmark are working closely on green technology and clean energy research.
Greta’s mental disposition, fostered on years of worrying about climate extinction (as her mother recalls, Greta has been reading about dying polar bears since she was eight and shortly after showing signs of selective mutism), is marked by the exclusive concern for mass extinction, genocide, death tolls, anger and hate that overshadows everything good. As such, it is perfectly welded into the New Normal worldview that thrives on the normalization of antisemitism, which we have seen exponentially expanding in the West for the past year (examples here or here or here).
And then, there is also this. So much for “it’s not against the Jews”.
While the seed to this hateful worldview certainly was not planted by Greta, it has surely thrived on the mental disfigurement she has brought into the world as a doom-loving, life-defying public figure—after all, she is the most famous political activist in the world.
But make no mistake: Greta is not concerned for the people she feigns to want to “liberate”. Not even the faintest sign of interest in the realities faced by the people under any jihadist-led regime has ever parted from her lips. The Hamas government in Gaza, a zone which has been autonomous since 2005 and is the internationally highest-funded area in the world, has not only done nothing to improve the lives of its citizens, but has used its funds for terror. Not a word on this from the climate activist, not a word of concern for the reality of “Palestinian lives”, never mind Iranian or Lebanese lives under Hamas or Hezbollah or the IRGC.
When you are only concerned with death—and have been from a young age—you do not care about life. A mind that is programmed to panic and commands everyone else to be the same—her famous words were not “I am panicking!”, but “I want you to panic!”—authoritatively craves disaster. And how can it be otherwise for a person who grew up with hardly anything besides images of dying polar bears?
It is therefore not a coincidence that the New Normal Society is prone to imitate such a world view. It betrays a fundamental lack of empathy and humor, a lack of a language that allows us to enjoy life, the other’s company, and respectfully and tolerantly share our disagreements openly.
But there is more to it. A society that bases its political horizon on the imagination of a mentally infirm young woman whose world of thought exhausts itself in hateful slogans cannot survive. It is itself as weak and damaged as the mind from which these slogans spring. Accordingly it is only a question of time till the pendulum swings back towards light, towards love again—also for young Greta. At least I am optimistic.
