Greta Thunberg’s Gaza flotilla is embroiled in infighting over the presence of a “queer activist” onboard, a disagreement that has resulted in prominent figures stepping down, including Thunberg herself. The quarrel first reached the press when a French newspaper published footage that showed a Tunisian activist, Khaled Boujemaa, accusing flotilla steering committee member Wael Nawar of hiding the fact that Saif Ayadi, an LGBTQ activist, was not just participating but prominently featured in the flotilla. 

Boujemaa later told a Facebook livestream he’d unhappily withdrawn from participating in the flotilla. Two other activists, Mariem Meftah and Samir Elwafi, protested the “queer” Ayadi’s presence, which they perceived as an attack on “societal values”. Around the same time, an Italian newspaper photographed Thunberg moving her suitcase from the leadership vessel to another flotilla boat. But while it’s tempting as an observer to go no further than mocking internal contradictions within this shaky coalition, it should prompt deeper reflection about what that coalition’s real direction of travel.

Though she came to prominence as a schoolgirl climate activist, Thunberg has in recent years switched her attention from the environment to the conflict in Palestine. This transition makes perfect sense from a European Left-wing perspective, as both these issues sit under the progressive ideological umbrella I’ve elsewhere called the “Omnicause”. 

This “Omnicause”, inasmuch as it has a coherent ideology, is united mainly in opposition to “Western” ideological and economic power — something that, as I’ve argued, ironically reflects the origin of at least its progressive components in a quintessentially “Western” ideological impulse to perpetual rebellion. Those who oppose this Omnicause are fond of jeering at the resulting internal contradictions, especially where LGBTQ activists collide with Islamists.

The tensions arise because Omnicause anti-Westernism and the Muslim kind are animated by profoundly different underlying ideologies. The former is, in essence, a spirit of negation, most completely expressed by “queer activism”, which is, at heart, a project of radical anti-normativity, itself a quintessentially “Western” impulse. Islam is, by contrast, a religion with 1,400 years of history and a robust set of norms predating modernity. The press might usefully spend less time laughing, and more noting the extent to which the Omnicause imagines itself as the umbrella cause — but its Islamist fellow-travellers see the power relationship the other way round.

In a Facebook post, Meftah denounced Queer Sumud activist Ayadi as “taking advantage of the sanctity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to give value to your cause and your ideas”. Palestine, asserted Samir Elwafi, “is the cause of Muslims first” and it’s not acceptable to “infiltrate suspicious activists who serve other agendas that do not concern us”. In other words, these activists view the Omnicause not as the umbrella but as a cautiously tolerated ally to the real Omnicause, which is the international fellowship of Muslims. 

Considered numerically, this makes sense: there are many more Muslims on the planet than there are Thunberg-style Omnicause radicals. Considered in terms of ideological dedication, it also makes sense: the only real unifying force within the Omnicause is opposition, whereas Islam is a coherent belief system. And over the long term, positive doctrine will always prevail over a mere spirit of negation.

In this context, then, we might be well-advised to spend less time mocking Omnicause radicals, and more time viewing them the way Islamists do: as useful idiots for advancing the real cause. The moment Omnicause anti-normativity stopped being useful as a PR talking point in progressive circles, and was instead perceived as a threat to the overall project, Global Sumud’s “queer” contingent was (at least figuratively speaking) thrown overboard. Reading between the lines of recent turmoil within Jeremy Corbyn’s “Your Party”, we might wonder if something similar happened to Zarah Sultana at the hands of that party’s “independent” MPs: Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed. 

And we might ask, in turn, whether it would be prudent to treat Omnicause activism with more circumspection, as ultimately just a vector for the onward march of international political Islam. 

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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