Genocidal Greta

Among the many leftists who have expressed support for Hamas, seemingly unconcerned with its outrages of October 7, is Greta Thunberg. Thunberg, now 20 years old, is regarded as a heroine by many for her uncompromising demand that the Western world (she hasn’t visited China, to my knowledge) stop using fossil fuels. Just the News reports (see original for links):

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is dividing the climate movement as she has been calling for the end of Israel while her organization, “Fridays for Future” has at the same time been promoting rhetoric online that has been endorsed by members of terrorist organizations.
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Thunberg…became vocal about her support for Palestine less than two weeks after Oct. 7, which marked the worst day for the death of Jews since the Holocaust. She posted a photo of herself with her friends holding signs supporting Palestine. She has continued posting photographs of herself protesting in support of Palestine and the fight against climate change nearly every week since.
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[T]he first group she promoted, Medical Aid for Palestinians, was accused in 2019 of misusing funds and promoting antisemitic rhetoric such as videos from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, while another group she promoted, the Palestinian Youth Movement, has promoted calls for violence as well as content from U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

But the anti-Israel rhetoric is not limited to her personal account. Fridays for Future International has multiple statements supporting Palestine….

For example, the international Fridays for Future X page reposted an Oct. 17 post calling for a global strike in support of Palestine from a page called “Propaganda,” which has repeatedly made posts critical of Israel and the United States. On Oct. 7, the day approximately 1,200 people were murdered and 240 others were kidnapped in Israel, Propaganda published a statement applauding the attack for “spreading fear in the hearts of occupying settlers who are crawling like dogs.”

Fridays for Future [Thunberg’s organization’s site] continued pushing for a global strike for Palestine on Oct. 19 by calling Israel a “settler colonial state,” pledging to “dismantle not only this textbook colonialism seen in Palestine, but all around the world in different forms and intensities” and accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people, echoing statements from the Hamas founding charter.

What is the connection between these two seemingly unrelated topics, global warming and the conflict between Israel and Hamas? One might say that a person who is wrong about one thing (global warming) is likely to be wrong about another (Gaza). But Thunberg isn’t just wrong, she is a passionate advocate against fossil fuels and against Israel–and, more broadly, “settler colonialism.”

That is not a coincidence. Rather, it reflects the fact that the climate change movement in which Thunberg is so prominent actually has little or nothing to do with climate change. Rather, it is an attack on the West. Fossil fuels are the foundation of modern civilization. They are the sole reason why we are not riding around in donkey carts and reading by candle light. Destroying fossil fuels means, at best, impoverishing the West.

That this is the activists’ real goal is evident from the fact that they train their fire not on China or India, but on the United States and Europe. If they were really concerned about the climate, this would make no sense, because China is by far the largest emitter of CO2. Robert Bryce produced this graph just a few days ago:

If you aren’t talking about Chinese emissions, everything you are saying about global warming is a joke. And neither Greta Thunberg nor Al Gore, Joe Biden or John Kerry is saying anything about Chinese emissions. If they really believed their own hype about global warming as an existential threat, they would be talking about invading China or bombing the hundreds of new coal plants that it has under development. But they don’t do that; instead, they stick up for the Chinese Communists and say they are doing a pretty good job. So their real goal isn’t affecting the climate, it is destroying Western economies and, thus, Western power.

Likewise with Israel. Neither Greta Thunberg nor any of her left-wing allies has shown any interest in Middle Eastern conflicts that do not involve Israel. From the Iran-Iraq war to the Syrian civil war to the homicidal conflict between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, they are uninvolved, no matter how many thousands of Arabs are killed. Only when Israel is a party–even when it is a party because of one of the most vicious acts of war carried out in the modern era–do they swing into action. Why do they care? Because Israel is Western in its orientation, and thus denounced as a “settler colonialist” country despite the fact that Jews were living in the Holy Land more than two thousand years before the first Arabs appeared.

That Greta Thunberg and many other leftists are engaged in both climate change and pro-Hamas activism is no coincidence. Rather, the two positions are of a piece: both are fraudulent and have little to do with their expressed purposes. Rather, both are born of hatred of Western civilization.