Selective Humanity
Embarrassing Blunder: Greta Thunberg Uses Photo of Hamas Hostage to Illustrate Plight of Palestinian Prisoners
The pro-Palestinian activist wrote about the "suffering of Palestinian prisoners" hours before the October 7 anniversary, but her message was undermined by a major factual error: including a picture of Israeli hostage Evyatar David, who has been held by Hamas for two years.
In a stunning display of ignorance and hypocrisy, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has once again thrust herself into the spotlight, not for climate advocacy this time, but for a botched social media post that clumsily defends Hamas's terrorist actions while inadvertently spotlighting an innocent Israeli victim. Just hours before the two-year anniversary of the barbaric October 7, 2023, massacre, where Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, including babies, the elderly, and festival-goers, and abducted over 250 hostages, Thunberg unleashed a one-sided tirade on the "suffering of Palestinian prisoners." Her message, dripping with selective outrage, completely erased the horrors inflicted by Hamas on Israeli civilians, focusing solely on alleged Israeli mistreatment without a whisper about the 48 hostages still languishing in Gaza's terror tunnels, many enduring starvation, torture, and unimaginable cruelty.
Thunberg's post, which racked up millions of views before facing backlash, was a masterclass in propaganda gone wrong. She declared, "The suffering of Palestinian prisoners is not a matter of opinion, it's a fact," while plastering her feed with accusations of Israeli "systematic cruelty and dehumanization." She even claimed that Israelis "not only mock the detainees, but also enjoy their suffering," adding, "They even go so far as to document themselves committing these crimes. Many videos and photos show them enjoying the abuse while documenting it simultaneously." And in a flourish of faux moral superiority, she intoned, "Humanity cannot be selective. Justice will not have borders." Yet, in her zeal to whitewash Hamas's atrocities, Thunberg committed a glaring, unforgivable error: one of her slides featured a heartbreaking photo of Evyatar David, a 28-year-old Israeli civilian kidnapped by Hamas gunmen from the Nova music festival on October 7. David, who has been held captive for two agonizing years, was unwittingly dragged into her narrative as if he were a Palestinian detainee suffering under Israeli hands. The irony is as thick as it is offensive, Thunberg, championing "justice," used the image of a victim of the very terrorists she refuses to condemn.
This isn't just a slip-up; it's a damning indictment of Thunberg's utter cluelessness about the Israel-Hamas war. She knows nothing of the conflict's brutal realities: the rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli neighborhoods, the suicide bombings and stabbings that have terrorized Jewish communities for decades, or the ironclad evidence of Hamas's war crimes, from using human shields to embedding military infrastructure in hospitals and schools. Instead, her post peddles a cartoonish villainy, painting Israel as the sole aggressor while Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., EU, and others, gets a free pass. No mention of the 1,200 lives snuffed out in a single day of sadistic rampage. No acknowledgment of the families torn apart by hostage-taking, where Hamas parades captives like trophies and rejects every ceasefire proposal that demands their release. Thunberg's "activism" here isn't about humanity; it's about fueling division, amplifying blood libels, and turning a blind eye to Jewish suffering because it doesn't fit her narrative.
The backlash was swift and justified, starting with the family of the man whose image she hijacked. Yaela David, Evyatar's sister, fired back publicly with a mix of heartbreak and fury: "You need to do research before you publish things you don't understand. On the sixth slide, you put a picture of an Israeli hostage whom Hamas deliberately starved. That is Evyatar David." Yaela's words cut deep, exposing Thunberg's post as not just biased, but dangerously uninformed. How does an activist with a global platform post without fact-checking? How does she ignore the pleas of hostage families who've begged the world to remember their loved ones, not exploit them?
This fiasco is hardly Thunberg's first rodeo in the realm of ill-considered interventions. Just weeks ago, she was detained during a blockade of a major U.S. arms supplier protesting the Gaza war, a stunt that earned her headlines but little else. And let's not forget her infamous October 2023 photo-op, where she posed with a toy octopus labeled "Israel" amid signs reading "Stand with Gaza" and "Crush Zionism", a tone that set the stage for her ongoing flirtation with antisemitic tropes. More recently, after her arrest in Israel during another protest, Swedish reports painted a picture of her detention as some Kafkaesque ordeal: held in a flea-infested cell, battling rashes and dehydration, with scant food or water. One fellow activist even accused Israeli interrogators of "forcing her to wave flags," a claim that reeks of exaggeration from those who cry victimhood at every turn. But here's the rub: while Thunberg whines about her brief discomfort, she says nothing of the Israeli hostages who've spent two years in Hamas's hellholes, beaten, isolated, and denied even the basics of human dignity.
Thunberg's blunder isn't isolated, it's symptomatic of a broader rot in pro-Palestinian activism, where facts are optional, context is the enemy, and Israeli lives are expendable footnotes. By slapping Evyatar David's face on her Hamas-apologist slideshow, she didn't just embarrass herself; she humanized, for a fleeting moment, the very victims her rhetoric seeks to invisibilize. Israel, meanwhile, continues its fight not out of cruelty, but necessity, to dismantle a terrorist regime that vows to repeat October 7 on a grander scale. The Jewish state has every right to defend its people, and every obligation to secure the hostages' return, even as it faces a world quick to demonize its every move.
It's time for Thunberg to log off, crack a history book, and reflect on the real selectivity poisoning her worldview. Until then, her "activism" remains what it is: idiotic propaganda from a dilettante who mistakes hashtags for homework. The families of the hostages, like the Davids, deserve better than to have their pain co-opted by clueless celebrities chasing clout. As the October 7 anniversary looms, let it be a reminder: true justice demands remembering all victims, not just the ones that suit your script.