Did Greta Thunberg refuse to watch Israel’s October 7 video?

Did Greta Thunberg refuse to watch footage of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities? That’s the accusation being made by Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz. Greta and her crew, upon their arrival in Israel last night, were taken into a room to be shown the harrowing truth of what Hamas did 20 months ago, says Katz. But when the video started rolling, and “they saw what it was about,” they “refused to continue watching,” he alleges.

This is a serious charge. Thunberg and her fellow sailors should address it with haste. For if what Katz is saying is true, if they really did look away upon being shown footage of the torture and slaughter of the Jews of Southern Israel, then we need to know why. To shut one’s eyes to the grim reality of Hamas’s anti-Semitic barbarism is to be willfully blind to one of the great horrors of our age – did you do that, Greta?

Israel just saved you from a bloody war zone, and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude?

Greta’s boat, the Madleen, was intercepted by Israeli forces. She and 11 other keffiyeh-wearing agitators had been hoping to land in Gaza, to “break the blockade.” It was a “selfie yacht,” in Israel’s salty words, that was carrying a “tiny amount of aid.” Israel towed the boat to its port city of Ashdod. The crew, these self-imagined saviors of Gaza, are being repatriated to their countries of origin this week.

Many shrill claims are being made about Israel’s interception. We’ve been “kidnapped,” said Greta. They hadn’t. They’re fine and they have sandwiches. “If anything happens to us, this is a war crime,” cried one of the boat folk as the IDF boarded. This is teenage petulance masquerading as activism. Israel just saved you from a bloody war zone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude?

If these people want to see real war crimes, they could do worse than watch Hamas’s own footage of the racist terror it inflicted on the innocents of Israel. And yet, according to Katz, they turned a “blind eye” to those war crimes. They looked away from the screen. His allegations are being widely reported in Israel and beyond.

Self-styled warriors for human rights refusing to watch one of the bloodiest assaults on human rights of the 21st century so far? Implacable anti-racists turning away from the worst act of anti-Jewish racism since the Nazis? If this is true, then it surely speaks to a profound moral blindness among the activist class, where they will sympathize with suffering humans everywhere except in Israel.

We await comment from Greta and the rest about whether they “refused” to watch – and if so, why. To my mind, if this shunning of truth did occur, then it is of a piece with the left’s agonized and sometimes outright shameful attitude towards October 7.

Greta and Co would only have been doing physically what the “pro-Palestine” set has been doing morally for nearly two years: refusing to grapple with the enormity of what Hamas did to the Jews on that darkest day.

The activist set has a truly tortured relationship with October 7. Some deny it, in a gross rehash of Holocaust denialism. It’s exaggerated, they cry. Women weren’t raped, they claim. Others say it was “resistance.” “This didn’t start on October7,” they snivelingly say, as if Hamas’s fascistic actions, its slaughter of Jewish women and burning alive of Jewish families, were an “understandable” response to Israeli policy. The last people who thought a pogrom was a legitimate response to political grievance were the Nazis.

The anti-Israeli mob can’t make their minds up. They can’t decide if October 7 didn’t really happen, or it did and it was justified. Their swirling post-truth disorientation, their sick refusal to speak honestly about what an army of anti-Semites did to Jews in this very decade, is born of a depthless moral cowardice. For they know that the truth of October 7 threatens to utterly shatter that precarious moral high ground they teeter on.

To admit that Hamas visited Nazi-style violence on innocent Jews would be to admit that leftists took the wrong side in the aftermath of that grimmest crime against humanity. For self-styled anti-fascists to acknowledge that they made excuses for the worst act of fascist violence of our times is unthinkable. So they bury, or at least downplay, the truth of Hamas’s atrocities, all to the low end of preserving their own phony moralism. Nothing as trifling as the suffering of Jews can be allowed to meddle with the self-aggrandizing narratives of the new left.

We cannot know for sure if Greta and her friends really “refused” to watch the October 7 footage. If they did, might this be why – because they could not bear to glimpse the barbarism committed by the Palestinian side in this war? By the side whose flag they wave and whose keffiyehs they wear? They must tell us what happened. This is important.