Greta Thunberg – still making all the right enemies

Greta Thunberg makes all the right enemies.

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.

Sure enough, as Thunberg’s popularity and influence grew, her name became instantly recognisable throughout the world and, much more importantly, synonymous with a noble tradition of resistance – one person, armed only with determination and a keen sense of righteousness declaring: Here I stand.

In time, millions of others across the globe volunteered to stand in solidarity – figuratively and literally – with Thunberg and, of course, her just and urgent mission.

Her apoplectic enemies – politicians, journalists and fossil fuel executives – have relied on their tired, crude modus operandi to put the immovable insurgent in her place.

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

They have failed. True to her indefatigable nature, Thunberg keeps raising her voice and offending the fragile sensibilities of the powerful, entrenched interests who have always wanted her to go away and shut up.

Despite the risks and unhinged assaults, Thunberg refuses to go away or shut up. Instead, these days, she has taken to wearing a keffiyeh and, in doing so, merged the movement for climate sanity and justice that she leads with the imperative to end the insanity and injustices being perpetrated against Palestinians with lethal ferocity by an apartheid state.

“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.”

She is right.

Neutrality and silence in the face of the unfolding genocide in the wasteland that is Gaza and the occupied West Bank is indeed complicity.

On reliable cue, the usual suspects in the usual places have hurled the usual sophomoric attacks at Thunberg with the aim of tarring her honourable name and discrediting her honourable intentions.

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

None of it, not even an ounce of the threats, intimidation and vitriol, has deterred Thunberg.

It hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work today. It won’t work because it is impossible to shout down, jail or ban the truth.

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

Thunberg has, with her head high, paid little, if any, mind to the torrent of invective and hate. She has always had better, more productive things to do.

The consequences of the campaign to vilify Thunberg are delightfully plain: Every furious effort to ban or muzzle her has made Thunberg more popular, not less; she is more in demand, not less; she is more vocal, not less.

Thunberg is also prima facie evidence of the glaring divide between the governed and the governors. The former are committed to ending the genocide in Gaza and beyond. The latter have, at every turn, enabled it in deference to Israel’s sacrosanct “right to defend itself” no matter the obscene human costs and blatant contempt for international law.

So, while the governors have used their pulpits and power to offer, full square, their diplomatic and military support to an indicted demagogue and his equally rancid regime, Thunberg has used 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 charge levelled against Thunberg by her hyperbolic critics is that by siding with the Palestinian victims of genocide, she has “betrayed” the “climate movement”.

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.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.