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’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

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’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Through his dehumanisation of Palestinians, his racist incitement and mindless conflation of “Israelis” and “Jews”, Morgan continues to add fuel to the fire of genocide.

I already had a very low opinion of Piers Morgan. But I was stunned by his display of racist ignorance last night while interviewing the Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, who showed great fortitude and dignity throughout.

Outrageously Morgan berates Alnaouq, whose entire family in Gaza was wiped out by Israel early on in its genocide, for insisting that there is a distinction – recognised by Palestinians, if not Israel – between Israelis and Jews.

Alnaouq points out that Palestinians have a problem, not with Jews, but with Israelis for violently occupying and colonising their land for many decades, and for putting Palestinians in Gaza under a brutal 17-year siege that has now been transformed into campaign of starvation.

The exchange has to be heard to be believed, starting at 59 minutes and 50 seconds.

“How can you say you have no problem with the Jews, but you have a problem with the Israelis, given that most Israelis are Jewish?” Morgan asks incredulously.

Alnaouq: “I am simply astonished that you can’t make the difference between the Jews and the Israelis, Piers.”

Morgan: “I am astonished you would try to draw a distinction.”

Morgan then insists that Hamas is a “death cult” determined to kill all Israelis because they are Jews.

Alnaouq: “It’s dangerous when you make this [out to be] a religious war.”

Morgan: “It’s dangerous when you try to pretend that they’re not after killing Jews…

“You don’t think Hamas target Jews because they are Jews.”

Alnaouq: “Of course, not.”

Morgan: “It’s nonsense.”

Alnaouq: “I am surprised that you are saying this, Piers. Genuinely, I am surprised.”

Morgan (again incredulous): “You’re surprised that I think Hamas target Jewish people.”

Alnaouq: “Of course.”

Morgan: “I find that staggering, Ahmed. It’s obviously a ridiculous thing to say.”

Alnaouq: “Why?”

Morgan: “Because obviously they target and murder as many Jewish people as they can get their hands on. And you say it’s because they are Israelis, not Jewish.”

Alnaouq: “Because they are occupiers, because they occupied our country.”

Morgan: “And because they are Jewish.”

Alnaouq: “No. Because they occupied our country, and colonised our country. Because they came to our country and kicked us out in 1948 and they killed thousands of Palestinians, including my grandparents.”

Morgan: “But you know why Israel was set up after World War Two. Because Jewish people were the victims of an appalling Holocaust by Hitler and the Nazis where 6 million of them were exterminated purely for their ethnicity and for being Jewish. So the Jewish people were given the state of Israel.”

Alnaouq: “My country.”

Morgan: “I understand that argument, but it wasn’t ‘Israelis’ given that land. It was the Jewish people.”

Alnaouq: “Who are you to give the Jewish people my country?”

You can learn much from this exchange about why the western political and media class have been so comfortable watching Israel commit a genocide against the Palestinians.

Journalists like Morgan are so immersed in their own confected narrative bubble, they have so bought into the dehumanisation of Palestinians, that Israel’s brutal, illegal occupation, colonisation and apartheid system is invisible to them – and therefore any resistance from Palestinians to their oppression by Israel can only be understood as an attack on Jews, as evidence of antisemitism.

Illustrating the trap faced by Palestinians, Alnaouq’s very attempts to make a clear distinction between “Israelis” and “Jews” is turned against him – becoming evidence for Morgan of his antisemitism.

Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

Morgan introduced Alnaouq by pointing out that the Palestinian journalist had written on X / Twitter last year, after his family in Gaza were killed: “I blame you, Piers Morgan, for their murder and the murder of all innocent people in Gaza.”

Morgan’s subsequent exchange with Alnaouq proved precisely his point. Through dehumanisation of Palestinians, through racist incitement, through mindless, antisemitic conflations of “Israeli” and “Jewish”, Morgan continues to add fuel to the fire, he continues to give succour to the genocide apologists 20 months into that genocide.

His sudden, extremely belated reversal over the past two weeks about whether Israel has “overstepped the rules of war” – conveniently coinciding with a similar reassessment in European capitals – should be welcomed. It may finally help to turn the tide on Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. But let us not forget that, had Morgan and others decided to turn that tide sooner, many thousands of Palestinian children might still be alive.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.