greta-thunberg | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

September 6, 2025

33:64 presents “Raphael Limkin.”

I’m big enough to admit when I’m wrong. Calling Greta Thunberg ‘Tom Thumberg’ in a recent post was, on reflection, both ill-advised and inaccurate.

In that same post I noted how the names given to the same phenomena – human actions causing irreversible negative impacts on the environment – had undergone a makeover. How global warming, as it was known, had an immediacy about it. Things were getting warmer and the whole world was affected. Simple, easily graspable and neat. Climate change, by contrast makes me think of a wealthy Victorian consumptive who retreats to the Swiss Alps for a year on the orders of her doctor. It isn’t frightening.

So in n that same spirit, henceforth I’ll call her the Poison Dwarf. This has nothing to do with her height. It’s to do with the poison that comes out of her mouth and that way that it reduces the worst crime ever to little more than a platform for her to promote her ‘virtue’. She is far from alone in this. People march, politicians bluster and the media fails, but all are united by one simple thing. They are either all stupid or else they have all chosen to deliberately misinterpret what the word genocide actually means. But not only that, but to also pervert the meaning of genocide to suit their own ends so that it no longer has a functionally specific one.

By that I mean that the word genocide has suddenly become a word whose meaning is contested and not just by placard waving simpletons either. But also by news outlets, academics, politicians and others who one would hope would roundly denounce such sophistry for the obscenity it was, have done the very opposite.

Previously, I’d always imagined the word to mean the specific killing of people based on their identity. Turns out I wasn’t too far wrong. According to the UN, it means “ acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Crucially, it also adds “the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted – not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected. This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals.”

To me, that’s pretty clear. Targeted killing because of being part of a group and nothing else. Which is exactly what happened on 7th October, when Israeli’s were massacred for simply being Jews. That’s what prompted Hamas to do it. Killing Jews, for no other reason beyond the fact that were Jews. Quite how this basic understanding has not seemed relevant as being the cause of the war that what followed is as incomprehensible as it is offensive.

So to is the fact that in the waging of any war, there will always been civilian deaths, especially when one side deliberately embeds itself within civilian infrastructure. The people in Gaza aren’t being killed because they’re Palestinian, their being killed because they live in a war zone. Again, how this basic understanding is absent is baffling. As to is how the one that is undeniably a genocide has been conveniently ignored been by those who wish to portray the one that isn’t as being inarguably one.

One has to observe that if Israel was indeed carrying out a genocide on Palestinian people, they’re being incredibly inept given as how Palestinians make up around 21% of Israels population. Perhaps that explains why the International Court of Justice has been repeatedly asked to broaden its definition of genocide so as to cover anything Israel does in its war with Hamas.

The Poison Dwarf is by no means the only person guilty of this reductive reasoning, ignoring the actual whilst amplifying the farcical. Many people may have their own reasons for doing so. For some, group acceptance, for others, career enhancement. For charities, aid organisations and other NGO’s, increased visibility on the world stage, a greater moral purpose and more funding and for politicians, something more international to focus on than the mundane and domestic

But it all boils down to the same thing. Egotism.

September 2, 2025

33:64 presents “Al Gore.”

Say what you will about everybody’s favourite doom monger, but she certainly practices what she preaches, when it comes to recycling anyway. Tom Thumberg is once again leading a flotilla of small ships, which will again be packed with humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza. Quite whether she imagines that she has a realistic chance of doing so is beside the point. The point is that she’s trying and the point is that the worlds press will be recording her every move and most importantly of all, will be on hand when Israel enforces its naval blockade of Gaza and prevents her armada from reaching its destination.

I imagine she knows she has as much chance of getting to Gaza as there is of there being a Pride march to greet her arrival if she did. But that isn’t her goal. Her goal is to draw much needed media attention to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza because of..you know..how the world has ignored it, and to also reposition herself as not just a climate change harridan but as a social justice warrior. And much like every other social justice warrior before her, I question exactly how much of her desire for social justice depends upon which society it is. Is hers an Orwellian concept of social justice whereby some societies are more equal than others?

But apparently to impugn her motives is to doubt her moral probity. Ahead of the flotillas departure she gave an interview to Sky News, in which she rejected accusations of anti-Semitism “It is not anti-Semitic to say that we should not be bombing people, that one should not be living in occupation, that everyone should have the right to live in freedom and dignity, no matter who you are.” Which is true, if you take away the first five words from that statement, that is. But what is also true, uncomfortably and undeniably true, is that when you put them back, and say those words in relation to the only Jewish state in the world, then what else can it be?

The same words, save the first five could just as equally apply to Yemen or Sudan. In Yemen, a civil war has been happening since 2014 and because of this, according to the UN, over 370,00 people have been killed. There is also an humanitarian aid crisis, as one might expect there to be in a war zone. 21 millions people, 11 millions of them children are at risk from starvation. Earlier this year there was a cholera outbreak. In Sudan, the situation is depressingly similar. A civil war. Factions splintering off into more factions. Over 500,00 dead since 2023. Again, the need for humanitarian aid is urgent.

I don’t want to play a grotesque version of Top Trumps here, but it seems as if Tom Thumberg does. Okay then. By the end of July 2025, some 63,000 Gaza’s had died. Why are their deaths more worthy of the worlds attention, why are their deaths to be so roundly condemned by people, organisations and countries whose anger seems to be exclusively focused on those in Gaza. Often by the very same countries who are who are participating in the wars in Yemen and Sudan?

Indeed, if she was serious in her intent to help alleviate the sufferings of the people of Gaza, she might better use one of her press conferences to question why, unlike in every other civil war civil war, Gaza’s neighbours haven’t opened their borders to allow for refugees to escape. And, for good measure, angrily demand to know why – according to the UN’s own figures – 85% of their food aid trucks into Gaza are hijacked by Hamas and other militia groups. And on the back of that, not only question why the UN continues to do something it knows doesn’t work, but also why that fact isn’t widely reported in the media.

But why would she? What’s in it for her? Given how the prevailing narrative casts Israel as uniquely evil and Hamas as essentially innocent, the backlash against her for doing so would be as immediate as it was inevitable. Much easier, and better for her long term career prospects, if she plays along.

After all, when her last Gaza cruise was curtailed by the Israelis, and they invited her to watch footage of the 7th October massacre, she refused. So for all her bleating on about “how everyone should have the right to live in freedom and dignity”, it proved how conditional her concern is, how hollow and performative she is. It also proves that she is right to call this latest stunt symbolic.

A load of symbolics.

June 8, 2025

34:63 presents “Greta Thunberg.”

The best kind of virtue signalling is, of course, the kind that has minimal adverse consequences for you, but a multitude of positive ones. The most audaciously successful example of this is Greta Thunberg’s ‘school strike’, which somehow transformed her bunking off into some sort of noble act of protest. Quite why no-one called ‘bullshit’ on her little stunt, I can’t explain, but fair play to her, by her constantly banging on about how something has been exacerbated by political inertia, and that because of that, the action needed to combat it is as drastic as it is urgent, she has managed to get away with it.

Because if I’d have tried to get justify me bunking off school as something other than a test of how far I could push my luck with my parents, I’d have gotten more than a stern talking to. If I’d then constantly been on at them to change their lifestyles, to the extent that my mother had to give up on her career as an international opera singer because I’d been incessantly haranguing her about her flying to concerts, I doubt if I’d be eventually invited to address the United Nations or nominated three times for the Nobel peace prize,

But because of the world we now live, one that places a disturbingly worrying amount of importance on positive media coverage, her bunking off has been rewarded with her being lauded as a something about that something. And because of this, she is given platforms upon which to berate pretty much everyone for not doing what she wants. And in an almost masochistic way, one that seems to have the bizarrely religious need for flagellation to it, the more she lambasts people, the more they seem to want it, She’s like a virtue signalling dominatrix.

And no virtue is more worthy to be signalled these days than support for the Palestinian people. Despite their plight being having as many complicated causes as the something she gained ‘celebrity for, that is the only similarity. Yes, people are starving, but so too are people in Yemen and the Sudan caught up in the middle of civil wars fought between disparate factions as only civil wars can be, but then again, their humanitarian crisis’ don’t lend themselves the kind of performative display of virtue that is so beloved by the media. She is on a boat, sailing towards Gaza, in an attempt to bring food and medical supplies to the people of Gaza, as I write this. She is also live-streaming the whole thing. Of course she is. After all, what’s the point of virtue signalling something, if no-one knows that your virtue signalling something?