Good riddance to Greta’s Gaza ship of fools

So the seafaring stunt is over. The ship of narcissists has been intercepted. Greta Thunberg and her gaggle of self-righteous keffiyeh clowns have been thwarted. They’re on their way, not to Gaza, but to the Israeli port city of Ashdod. One envisions the Med ringing out with wails of ‘HOW DARE YOU’ as Greta and her muppet apostles berate Israel for foiling their messianic mission to save the people of Gaza from evil.

There is nothing that isn’t funny about the collapse of Greta’s white-saviour bullshit. I have especially enjoyed the juvenile bawling of the vain crew. ‘We’ve been kidnapped!’, cried Greta. They haven’t. They’re fine. They are ‘safely making [their] way to the shores of Israel’ and they have sandwiches. ‘This is a war crime!’, yelped one of the sailing saviours as Israeli forces boarded, in tones not dissimilar to Kevin the Teenager when his parents would send him to bed.

There’s the delicious fact that it was Greta that ended up getting aid. That pic of an IDF soldier giving her a plastic-wrapped kosher sandwich is equal parts touching and hilarious. ‘I thought Greta was going to deliver the humanitarian aid, not receive it?’, as Eve Barlow quipped. The soldier is in full military garb, as befits his role as a warrior against the army of anti-Semites that attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. Greta is wearing a frog hat, as befits her role as patron saint of the faux-virtuous idiot rich kids of TikTok.

Then there’s Israel’s trolling. The Jewish State is ripping the piss out of Greta and I am so here for it. We’ve intercepted the ‘selfie yacht’ of ‘celebrities’ whose ‘sole purpose’ was to ‘gain publicity’, said Israel’s Foreign Ministry. The ‘tiny amount of aid on the yacht [that] was not consumed by the “celebrities”’ will now be ‘transferred to Gaza’, it announced. Because, believe it or not, you can feed people in a way that does not ‘involve Instagram selfies’. Oh snap. Hold the salt, Israel.

Lunatics on the internet were worried that Israel might bump Greta off. ‘Nothing is too insane for Israel’, including the ‘murder [of] Greta Thunberg’, said soy leftist turned digital hysteric, Owen Jones. Calm down, folks. She’s being memed, not murdered. ‘Greta Thunberg is… safe and in good spirits’, said the official X account of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. ‘The show is over.’ Now that’s how you puncture the bloated self-regard of a sea-going gang of Israelophobes who are so high on their own supply of moral vanity that they really think they can ‘Save Gaza’.

It’s brilliant to see the fizzling out of this summer jaunt to the Med masquerading as a moral crusade. For nothing has ever captured the lazy theatrics and fake virtue of modern activism as much as Greta’s dumb boat did. This so-called freedom flotilla would have done precisely nothing to assist the suffering people of Gaza. That was never really its aim. The ship of fools was always more interested in raising awareness about itself and its moral brilliance than about the needs of Gaza’s civilians.

Indeed, as Greta and Co crossed the choppy Med with their ‘tiny amount of aid’, Evil Israel handed out millions of meals in Gaza. In the first 15 days of its operations, the US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has given more than 10million meals to the needy. You couldn’t write satire like this: 12 woke fainthearts on a boat wail ‘Feed Gaza!’ as Israel does exactly that. As Greta and her smug chums bloviated on their boat to any media channel that would listen, Israel did the hard graft of feeding a war-whacked populace. As they took selfies of themselves sobbing into their keffiyehs about hungry Gazans, Israel was giving those Gazans food. They did moral pantomime, for likes on Instagram; Israel did aid, with no thanks at all.

Tell me that doesn’t sum up 21st-century activism. Tell me it doesn’t shine a brilliant light on the self-serving shitshow that is modern ‘leftism’, where the aim is always to accrue greater virtue for oneself rather than to improve the lot of others. As Greta was snapped dangling her legs off the hull of her boat in the glorious sun, young IDF troops were risking their lives guiding food trucks through a warzone. And you want us to cheer her? Forget about it. To some of us, it feels like the people on that boat were primarily interested in rebuilding their moral brand on the rubble of a bloody war. That’s not admirable, it’s sick.

Yet even as we cheer the interception of this ship of pricks, we need to get real about what it tells us about our times. This flurry of keffiyehs in the sea, and the cheering of it by the media elites, confirms that your virtue is now measured by how much you hate Israel. The old omnicauses of climate change and gender bollocks have withered away, to be replaced by the new omnicause of raging against the Jewish State. Hence, Greta has swapped her childish baloney about billions perishing at the altar of modernity in favour of lamenting Israel’s ‘genocide’ and the threat it supposedly poses to us all. You don’t need a PhD on 20th-century Europe to recognise how dangerous it is for the self-righteous of the West to define themselves in direct and furious opposition to the world’s only Jewish nation.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy