Mick Hartley

Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph, on Sally Rooney:

At the weekend, she gave a speech in Amsterdam on the horrendous war in Sudan that has laid waste to so much human life. Only joking. She talked about Gaza. These people speak of nothing else.

She was speaking at The People’s Congress for the Hague Group, a cranky outfit hell-bent on dragging the Jewish State to the International Criminal Court to answer for the “crime” of fighting back against the army of anti-Semites that invaded it on October 7, 2023.

With ocean-going pomposity, she said we brave few who stand up for Palestine are standing up for the planet itself. Humanity’s very “future on this earth” depends on us, she said, with all the humility of Caligula on a bender.

Our “adversaries”, she continued, as if she were Boudica rather than a gold-collared luminary of the literary set, are the same people who are destroying life as we know it….

“By standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on earth”, she said.

The egotism is off the scale. These are hitherto untapped levels of self-regard.

The Israelophobic smug set really does believe that, in boycotting Israeli oranges, it is helping to save earth itself from a fiery death at the hands of evil rich people.

Then the Marie Antoinette of Palestine solidarity did something extraordinary – she unwittingly confirmed that “Palestine” is now little more than a moral prop in the lives of bored middle-class millennials.

She told her fawning audience that Palestine solidarity is the great cause of our time because: “What else… can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves, and to fight for our future?”

Standing with Palestine is the only thing that can “make our lives endurable”, she said.

This is a staggering admission. Rooney has pulled back the curtain – or keffiyeh, perhaps – on the depthless vanity of Palestine activism.

Deranged. But then, all part of Ireland’s anti-Israel obsession.