ByAFP
June 18, 2025
Mark van Rennes said future missions could take place - Copyright ANP/AFP Koen van Weel
The Dutch captain of a Gaza-bound ship carrying activists including Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg said Wednesday future missions could still be in the works as he returned to the Netherlands.
Mark van Rennes arrived back at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, greeted by dozens of supporters, some carrying Palestinian flags and banners reading “Free Palestine.”
His ship, the Madleen, operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, left Italy on June 1 with the aim of delivering aid and challenging the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Israel’s military intercepted the vessel, which it dubbed the “selfie yacht”, saying it was not authorised to travel to the war-torn area.
Asked if future missions could happen, Van Rennes said: “The blockade (of Gaza) has been going for 18 years and it’s still ongoing.”
“The oppression of the Palestinians is ongoing. As long as that is ongoing, the flotilla will go on as well,” he added.
After being taken to an Israeli port, Thunberg and three other activists agreed to be deported immediately.
But Israeli authorities detained eight others, who appeared before an immigration tribunal before being sent back to their home countries.
Van Rennes was supposed to return to the Netherlands on Friday but Israel airspace was closed due to the ongoing conflict with Iran.
He said his conditions while being held in Israel were “not ideal” and he went to hospital twice in Jordan on his way back, but did not give more details.
“I think the focus should be on the more than 10,000 Palestinians who are now still in detention camps who are in much worse conditions, being tortured and humiliated every day,” he told AFP.
The war was triggered by an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to official Israeli figures.
The overall death toll in Gaza since the war broke out reached 55,493 people, according to the health ministry health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
The war has ravaged the Gaza Strip, with shortages of food, fuel and clean water.
Greta Thunberg and the Merchants of Smear
The "Selfie Yacht"
If there’s one thing the ‘impartial’, ‘independent’ ‘free press’ can’t stand, it’s someone – citizens, journalists, politicians, celebrities, anyone – protesting the West’s wars.
The one-size-fits-all smear deployed to define and dismiss the concerns of these troublemakers – people who often pay a high price for their dissent – is ‘narcissist’.
Consider the case of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which last week attempted to break the Israeli naval blockade to deliver baby formula and food to Gaza’s starving population. And that, by the way, is not hyperbole. In May, the World Health Organisation reported that ‘half a million people’ in Gaza were ‘in a catastrophic situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death’. The flotilla was led by the UK-flagged vessel Madleen, with renowned Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg onboard.
Perhaps shaken by his recent, uncharacteristic display of principled moral outrage, the eponymous host of Piers Morgan Uncensored, last week wrote on X:
‘Oh shut up, @GretaThunberg – you attention-seeking narcissist. What an insult to the actual hostages in Gaza who really WERE kidnapped. This stupid stunt is all about your ego, and will make zero difference to the plight of innocent Palestinians caught up in this dreadful war.’
In the Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill felt Morgan’s pain in a piece titled, ‘Greta Thunberg’s narcissism has escalated to terrifying levels.’
The ‘terrifying’ Thunberg, no less! O’Neill opined:
‘Of all the smug stunts of the faux-virtuous activist class, this is surely the most preposterous. The idea that 12 woke fainthearts from Europe might “liberate” Gaza would be funny if it were not so dangerous.’
That was not the intention at all, of course. The intention was to raise awareness of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – in that aim, the flotilla was a great success.
The Mirror noted that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs had branded the Madleen a ‘selfie yacht’. By eerie coincidence, much of the ‘mainstream’ media followed suit.
In the Daily Mail, Sam Greenhill’s headline read: ‘Israeli forces storm Greta’s “selfie yacht” and make her watch Hamas terror footage.’ (Greenhill, Daily Mail, 10 June 2025). Greenhill commented:
‘Critics suggested it had been a “gap-year protest”, and the Israeli government said Ms Thunberg had been “feeding her ego” rather than the people of Gaza.’
What could be more natural, more ‘mainstream’, than passing on, with approval, a slur supplied by a government committing genocide?
If ‘kidnapping’ won’t do for Piers Morgan, let’s try ‘hijacking’. Journalist Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News commented:
‘Let’s be clear: Israel, an occupier, has no authority under international law to board or divert the Madleen.
‘This is a hijacking, plain and simple. A hijacking of a UK-registered ship, with multiple *European* citizens on board.’
Hasan invited readers to imagine the Western response if Iran had rammed and hijacked a boat full of European citizens in international waters in the same way.
Morgan’s fiercely expressed idea that Thunberg was merely engaged in an attention-seeking ‘stunt’ reverses the truth. Narcissists do not seek attention by taking on a genocidal army that has devastated both Gaza and previous vessels attempting the same journey. On X, Alonso Gurmendi of the London School of Economics noted that there had been five similar flotillas prior to the Madleen’s voyage. Israel used force against four of them:
‘2010: 10 killed
‘2011: no incidents
‘2015: crew detained for 6 days
‘2018: crew tasered
‘2025: drones shot at the ship’
In the 2010 attack on the Mavi Marmara, 10 activists were killed by Israeli forces with dozens wounded. Last month, the Conscience, a vessel carrying human rights activists and humanitarian aid for Gaza, organised by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was attacked by Israeli drones in international waters off the coast of Malta:
‘The Freedom Flotilla Coalition reported that the ship was struck twice by drones at around 00:23 (CEST), with both attacks targeting the vessel’s generators at the front of the ship. The strikes caused a fire and a breach in the hull, placing the vessel at imminent risk of sinking.’
Given the genocidal actions of the Israeli army over the last 20 months – including ‘at least 220 journalists killed’ since 7 October 2023, as Channel 4’s Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson noted last week on X – no-one on the Madleen had any compelling reason to feel safe. Far from being an attention-seeking ‘stunt’, Thunberg and her companions showed real courage.
In the Telegraph, former Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore pumped bile:
‘What matters above all are the images of the selfie-yacht and the attention they can garner. Being boarded and detained (or, as she puts it, “kidnapped”) by Israeli forces gave her exactly what she had hoped for to kick against…’
Thunberg’s ‘stunt’, it seems, had been ‘self-aggrandising and vacuous’. In a comment that typifies the tendency of hard-right merchants of smear to overreach, Moore added:
‘Watching footage of this climate activist and her mates all chucking their expensive phones into the sea as they were about to be taken by the Israelis showed that, of course, when the chips were down, environmental concerns went out of the window.’
And, as ever, the young and compassionate – people who aren’t just banking a salary, people who care – are just naïve fools blundering in the dark:
‘The omnicause burns itself out in the end because it has no actual strategy. It simply signifies tribal loyalty. It gobbles everything up and spits out its participants, who simply move on to the next “wrong” thing.’
But it is right to protest Israel’s genocide, which is wrong, just as the insane indifference to the destabilisation of the climate is wrong. In 42 seconds, in this video on X, Thunberg explains why it is absolutely coherent to protest both of these crimes.
When working for the Guardian, Moore distinguished herself by tweeting of Julian Assange in 2012:
‘He really is the most massive turd.’
Moore then commented to a colleague:
‘I never met him. Did you?’
Moore later wrote in the New Statesman:
‘O frabjous day! We are all bored out of our minds with Brexit when a demented looking gnome is pulled out of the Ecuadorian embassy by the secret police of the deep state. Or “the met” as normal people call them.’
Jake Wallis Simons, who writes regularly for the Jewish Chronicle (JC), which he edited from December 2021 until January 2025, has been busy smearing Thunberg in the Daily Mail and Telegraph with damning articles titled:
‘Greta Thunberg is deeply immature, lacks all shame … and there is a dark truth about her crusade to Gaza’ (Daily Mail, 7 June 2025)
‘It’s staggeringly offensive of Thunberg to claim she’s been “kidnapped” when we know what real kidnap looks like’ (Daily Mail, 10 June 2025)
‘Greta’s blind eye to murder’ (The Telegraph, 10 June 2025)
In September 2024, when Wallis Simons was editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, no dissident, wrote an open letter to him on social media, under the comment:
‘I have today told the editor of the Jewish Chronicle that I can no longer continue my relationship with the paper.’
Freedland’s reasoning:
‘Too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.’
Jonathan Cook commented:
‘One such example was a tweet (since deleted) from Wallis Simons last December, when Israel had already killed thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. Over a video of a huge explosion killing untold numbers of Palestinians in Gaza City, the JC’s editor wrote: “Onwards to victory.”’
It seems Wallis Simons has Thunberg all worked out:
‘Let’s stop beating around the selfie yacht. It was never truly about the climate, any more than it was truly about the conflict in the Middle East. Closing her eyes to the October 7 footage crystallised the sustaining principle of Greta Thunberg: she is absorbed in a world of her own. It is a world that began with hating her teachers; went on to hating the establishment; and has ended with hating the Jews and the West, powered by endless selfies.’
Without a trace of evidence, then, Thunberg is reflexively smeared as an anti-semite. Cook noted the sudden obsession with selfies:
‘Strangely, journalists who had barely acknowledged the tsunami of selfies taken by Israeli soldiers glorifying their war crimes on social media were keenly attuned to a supposed narcissistic, selfie culture rampant among human-rights activists.’
Ricky Hale said it best on X:
‘Amazing that we live in a time when starving people are being lured into the open to be gunned down by Israel and the media thinks the villain of the story is a tiny autistic woman who tried to feed them.’
Of Tans and Byronic Haircuts
Thus, if it was not already the case, Thunberg has joined the long list of dissidents dismissed as self-aggrandising ‘narcissists’.
In 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek featured an article entitled, ‘The Unbearable Narcissism of Edward Snowden.’
In 2016, Labour MP Chris Evans noted Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘self-indulgence, egotism, arrogance and narcissism’.
Janice Turner commented on Corbyn in The Times:
‘He’s beloved of narcissists and conspiracists, such as Julian Assange, George Galloway, John Pilger and Ken Livingstone …’
Narcissists all! In the Observer, Charles Jennings described how Pilger’s narcissism was obvious from ‘his tan, his Byronic haircut, his trudging priestly delivery and his evident self-love’. (Jennings, The Observer, 24 January 1999) We knew Pilger well; he was one of the most generous, compassionate people we have met. What was so striking, even startling, about him was his willingness to risk his access to ‘mainstream’ media by exposing their lethal propaganda – he savaged the hands that fed him. That is forbidden, of course, and it cost him his columns in the Guardian and the New Statesman. None of his critics would be willing to pay a fraction of that price.
In 2020, Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer of the conspicuously humble and selfless Jeremy Corbyn:
‘Many things have been said about his character over the years, but one thing has not been said enough: he is a narcissist.’
Julian Assange, of course, has been endlessly labelled the same way. A typical headline from the Daily Mail in 2011 read:
‘The WikiFreak: In a new book one author reveals how she got to know Julian Assange and found him a predatory, narcissistic fantasist’
In the Sunday Times, Katie Glass described Russell Brand as ‘an exhibitionistic narcissist obsessed with celebrity’. (Katie Glass, ‘The ultimate Marmite Brand,’ Sunday Times, 22 September 2013)
And according to the Guardian, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was a peddler of ‘strutting and narcissistic populism’.
Readers might wonder where that leaves us at Media Lens. Alas, in his Guardian column, then Associate Editor Michael White observed that Media Lens ‘betrays the narcissism of small difference that is so destructive on the left’.
It’s been six years since that white, middle-class teenage girl with autism stood before world leaders at the UN Climate Summit and exclaimed indignantly “How dare you!” Greta Thunberg became an object of ridicule—not only from climate change deniers and conservative politicians, but also from parts of the anti-capitalist left. To them, the so-called awkward blonde girl with the pigtails was a greenwashing tool for corporate capitalism, with suspiciously easy access to global media platforms and multinational organisations.
By now, you’d think that many of her critics—on both ends of the political spectrum—might have offered an apology. After all, Greta was simply a young girl moved to action by the greatest threat facing our planet—one that her generation will be forced to pay for dearly. And what’s been proven over these six years? That she was never a puppet of capital, never a distraction from the real struggle, never a spokesperson for green neoliberalism.
In fact, the more Greta developed a sophisticated critique of the global economic and political order, the more she disappeared from mainstream media—despite her enduring influence on European social movements and her persistent political interventions. Meanwhile, much of the left failed to conduct even the slightest self-criticism of how it misread and mistreated the “Greta phenomenon.” It simply couldn’t stomach the idea that a privileged, white Swedish girl could be truly anti-capitalist, capable of intersectionally linking contemporary struggles, without being politically “baptised” in the ways we were.
And yet, Greta stands as a defining figure in the political awakening and radicalisation of today’s youth. This generation isn’t waiting for mass parties or traditional movements to lead the way. They take to the streets, invent their own repertoires of action (see Fridays for Future), maximise digital tools and connectivity, and articulate a holistic anti-capitalist discourse that ties together the climate crisis, social inequality, neo-colonialism, and racism. No one has to sit them down and explain that it’s all connected—they already know.
That’s why it came as no surprise to many of us when Greta stood in solidarity with Palestine. Her words—
“If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist“
—echo the ethical clarity of a generation that refuses to be neutral. In the defining moral confrontation of our time, young people like Greta are choosing sides, and doing so in the most radical way they can. Some sail to Gaza with humanitarian aid. Others wave Palestinian flags at their Harvard graduation. A few shout “Free Palestine” in keffiyehs after winning a boxing match.
But the defamation of those who stand with the Palestinian people has reached disturbing levels. The global alt-right propaganda machine, now deeply embedded in the most popular social media platforms, works overtime to spread fake news, discredit activists, obscure the wave of international solidarity, and sow confusion. Just yesterday, a crudely doctored photo made the rounds: Greta supposedly holding an Aperol Spritz aboard the humanitarian aid ship. It spread like wildfire among the same people who mocked the “spoiled autistic teen” back in 2019—and yes, even some segments of the Left, ever eager to feel validated in their mistrust of “Green Greta,” shared it too.
But the real tragedy isn’t just how easily people fall for AI-generated lies and disinformation. It’s how intolerable it’s become to accept that some young people still dare to act spontaneously, genuinely, politically disrupting the apathy and cynicism that so many have grown comfortable with.
In a time when ressentiment seems to be the dominant political emotion in our societies, people who care about more than their own skin become a source of irritation. Not just for the powerful—but for the powerless, too. For those who can no longer even lift their eyes to the sky, let alone question, demand, or become like Greta. In a world consumed by ressentiment, choose to be like Greta.
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