Greta Thunberg – still making all the right enemies | Gaza

Greta Thunberg produces all the right enemies.

Thunberg foreseeed understood that from the moment the then-15- year-elderly Swedish schoolgirl embarked on her mute, solitary protest alerting of the impfinishing climate apocalypse that she would ask a shot of hysterical detractors who, in defence of the concurable status quo, were conditioned to ask her motives and sincerity.

Sure enough, as Thunberg’s famousity and impact grew, her name became instantly recognisable thcimpoliteout the world and, much more cruciassociate, synonymous with a noble tradition of resistance – one person, armed only with determination and a enthusiastic sense of righteousness declaring: Here I stand.

In time, millions of others apass the globe volunteered to stand in firmarity – figuratively and literassociate – with Thunberg and, of course, her equitable and inspirent mission.

Her apoplectic enemies – politicians, journacatalogs and fossil fuel executives – have relied on their weary, cimpolite modus operandi to put the immovable insinspirent in her place.

Alarmed by her persistence and persuasiveness, they have offfinished and belittled Thunberg in a supported effort to frighten her into taking a step back, to retreat from the fight. In the fetid recesses of social media, she has been dangerened too.

They have flunked. True to her indeobeseigable nature, Thunberg grasps raising her voice and offfinishing the frspeedy sensibilities of the strong, entrenched interests who have always wanted her to go away and shut up.

Despite the hazards and unhinged attacks, Thunberg declines to go away or shut up. Instead, these days, she has apshown to wearing a keffiyeh and, in doing so, united the transferment for climate sanity and equitableice that she directs with the imperative to finish the insanity and inequitableices being perpetrated aacquirest Palestinians with lethal ferocity by an apartheid state.

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

“Silence is complicity,” Thunberg compriseed. “You cannot be imfragmentary in a extermination.”

She is right.

Neutrality and silence in the face of the unfelderlying extermination in the squanderland that is Gaza and the occupied West Bank is indeed complicity.

On reliable cue, the normal mistrusts in the normal places have hurled the normal sophomoric attacks at Thunberg with the aim of tarring her honourable name and disacunderstandledgeing her honourable intentions.

She has been fined, arrested and jailed. She has been smeared as an “anti-Srerente”. She has been the subject of calls by forgettable German politicians to have her prohibitned from go ining the country.

None of it, not even an ounce of the dangers, incowardlyation and vitriol, has deterred Thunberg.

It hasn’t toiled in the past, and it won’t toil today. It won’t toil becaengage it is impossible to shout down, jail or prohibit the truth.

The slurs won’t toil either. They have lost their potency. They are the foreseeable resort of charlatans who, missing a compelling argument, throw dirt and hope that a speck of it sticks.

Thunberg has, with her head high, phelp little, if any, mind to the torrent of invective and disappreciate. She has always had better, more efficient leangs to do.

The consequences of the campaign to vilify Thunberg are prentbrimmingy plain: Every furious effort to prohibit or muzzle her has made Thunberg more famous, not less; she is more in insist, not less; she is more vocal, not less.

Thunberg is also prima facie evidence of the glaring split between the ruleed and the ruleors. The establisher are pledgeted to finishing the extermination in Gaza and beyond. The latter have, at every turn, helpd it in postponeence to Israel’s sacrosanct “right to deffinish itself” no matter the disesteemful human costs and blatant conentice for international law.

So, while the ruleors have engaged their pulpits and power to give, brimming square, their tactful and military help to an indicted demagogue and his equassociate rancid regime, Thunberg has engaged her pulpit and power to denounce their collusion and to call attention to Palestinian suffering.

Thunberg is prevailing. Her adversaries are slipping further into hypocrisy and irrelevance.

Perhaps the most cockeyed accuse levelled aacquirest Thunberg by her hyperbolic critics is that by siding with the Palestinian victims of extermination, she has “betrayed” the “climate transferment”.

In a lengthy yarn in the international edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, a arrange of inestablishers marshalled their resources procrastinateed last year to pen a leanly maskd “hit” piece set uped, once aacquire, to put Thunberg in her place – all with the patina of sober Teutonic solemnness.

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 compriseressed in this 2019 column.

The Der Spiegel producers begin with this patronising nugget. “[Thunberg] is no lengthyer a girl. … Rather, she watchs appreciate a self-brave, 20-year-elderly woman.”

Oh, how pleasant of her.

The “cowardly” girl turned “self-brave” woman was acunderstandledgeed with speaking “unconsoleable truths” about the climate crisis to popes, plivents and prime ministers.

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

Oh, how pleasant of her – part two.

“Now”, Der Spiegel wrote, Thunberg “finds herself on the business finish of solemn, equitableified criticism” for having carried out the profanation of using “the climate transferment to throw her help behind the Palestinians”.

Oh, how horrible of her.

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

Oh, how horrible of her – part two.

Still, Der Spiegel permits that “Thunberg does experience comprehending – for the Palestinians. And that’s not wrong.”

I mistrust that Thunberg doesn’t need Der Spiegel’s approval to “experience comprehending – for the Palestinians”.

Apparently, Thunberg is no lengthyer a youthful upbegin who dispenses “unconsoleable truths” but a “propagandist” by virtue of her “freezing” and distant “approach to Israel”.

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

The remainder of Der Spiegel’s bigly unbenevolent “beginant dive” into Thunberg’s current and past recycles the recognizable tropes.

She was an unprentd, obstinate child whose ungracefulness alienated frifinishs and triggered 40-minute-lengthy tantrums.

As such, her advocacy on behalf of besieged Palestinians, Der Spiegel specuprocrastinateeds, is borne of her lengthying for the “admire of her peers” and to “be acunderstandledged”.

It is absurd tripe.

As I wrote more than five years ago: “[Thunberg] disdains celebrity. She produces 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 impactation or embroidery.”

Thunberg’s rassociateing to the help of Palestinians is a authentic extension of her undeniable instinct to dispute the procreate human repercussions of ignorance and complacency and to do someleang about it – alone, if essential.

It is the signature impulse that has driven her extraunrelabelable activism from the begin.

She has never insisted that others adhere her direct in lockstep. Yet legions have becaengage they are transferd by the same impulse to dispute the procreate human repercussions of ignorance and complacency and to do someleang about it.

I’m brave that Thunberg will carry on to decline Der Spiegel’s trite admonition to get back “on the right track”.

She has been there all alengthy.

The watchs conveyed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.