So, Greta Thunberg has a new cause. Forget saving the planet β now she wants to save Palestine. Yes, the pint-sized prophetess of doom has swapped raging against industrialism for raging against Israel. Mother Nature will just have to wait β her erstwhile valiant defender is busy fixing the Middle East now. She looked the part.
She had a keffiyeh draped over her shoulders and a smug look on her face: the two must-haves of every puffed-up bourgeois activist who gets off on fuming against Israel. The keffiyeh really has become the uniform of the self-righteous. Not long ago, the right-on raged against white dudes who wear their hair in dreadlocks and white women who don kominos. Yet now they themselves spend their days in Arab attire.
That image of Greta in Malmo, looking very satisfied with herself, summed up the role the keffiyeh plays in the life of the 21st-century activist. Keffiyeh-wearing is less about drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians than drawing attention to you. Yet beneath their radical chic, darker sentiments lurk. Their boilerplate hatred for Israel can have horrible consequences.
So while young Greta was signalling her virtue on the streets of Malmo, another young woman was holed up in her hotel room for fear of mob assault. A mob even swarmed around the hotel Ms Golan was staying in. She received death threats. Things were so bad that she was warned not to leave her room. She was given a hour security detail. It looks more like bullying to me. The bullying of a young woman by a baying mob of Israel-bashers.
How galling that Greta should have been in the thick of such a regressive protest. This is someone who has spoken out about her own experiences of bullying. Who has said that women in the public eye get too much flak.
