Set a course for adventure, your mind on a new romance.
Sounds like someone on board Greta Thunberg’s pathetic attempt to run an Israeli blockade on Gaza may have focused on something other than lefty fantasies about proletarian crusades. This weekend, reports emerged that at least one of the leaders in Thunberg’s Navy angered the sailors by being less than discreet about bunk assignments. But does this amount to “sexual misconduct”? YMMV:
Greta Thunberg’s freedom flotilla, which set sail from Barcelona Sunday for another anti-Israel voyage to Gaza, has been rocked by scandal after one of its woke leaders was accused of “sexual misconduct” with at least three volunteers.
“A senior leader within the flotilla — a member of the steering committee, the highest governing body of the organization — engaged in sexual relations with multiple activists while on the boat heading to Gaza. Not one person. Not two. Three different individuals,” claimed Palestinian group Heart of Falastin in a social media post earlier this week.
“To do it on the boat, while heading to a nation undergoing genocide, with volunteers who are under your authority . . . is a clear violation of ethics and power.”
One Brazilian group named the alleged horndog as activist Thiago Avila, in an X post unearthed by media watchdog Honest Reporting and shared with The Post.
Man, I am getting old. I can dimly recall the days when leftist activists used to claim that the Right was sexually uptight and use the promise of ‘free love’ to attract young people to their causes. The Left made it practically an article of faith that everyone had their own agency, monogamy was a capitalist structure that enslaved women, and liberation looked a lot like a scene from Hair, at least the stage version.
Nowadays, the Left has practically adopted Cotton Mather as its icon.
So what actually happened on Thunberg’s scowling watch? It depends on who you ask, apparently. The group claims that Avila preyed on women in the group:
Heart of Falastin then said, “Have sex with whoever you want. But to do it on the boat, while heading to a nation undergoing genocide, with volunteers who are under your authority, in a space where activists are sleeping, eating, and working together, is a clear violation of power.”
Under his “authority”? What authority would that be? Everyone volunteered for this mission. Avila may have been an organizer and directed operations, but no one there relied on Avila for job reviews, opportunities for promotion, or a salary. That doesn’t eliminate the social mores involved in his actions, to which we’ll return in a moment, but this isn’t a case of the boss trolling interns for sexual favors. This is a camping trip on the seas among co-equal activists who reportedly needed more structure in their day rather than less.
At least one of the women believed to have shared a bunk with Avila isn’t complaining about it anyway:
Other activists on the flotilla, such as Lisi Proenca (believed to be one of the three women), soon took to social media to defend Avila, whom they call a “good friend and comrade.”
Well … what’s the problem? Perhaps the other two women complained about it, and one could understand why they could be offended. None of them have come forward with those complaints, though, and the statement from Heart of Falastin doesn’t mention any complaints from the women themselves. Instead, the group issued a statement that contradicts itself by first declaring, “Have sex with whoever [sic] you want,” and then lecturing about the timing and location while muttering about a “violation of power.” If the women wanted to have sex with Avila, why wouldn’t that fall under “have sex with whoever you want”?
The new rule on the Left seems to be: Have sex with whomever you want … as long as it is approved by the committee of the whole at the twice-weekly drum circle with unanimous consent, and as long as you don’t date down or date up in some fashion within the command structure of an activist cell.
Avila himself denies anything happened at all, calling it a “smear” campaign, but not everyone’s buying it:
“On a ship carrying humanitarian aid, a Brazilian shows up with his d*ck swinging and the only thing he manages to do is f**k and get arrested,” Anti Esquerda Esquerda Club, a group that describes itself as criticise the left from the left, wrote on X on Tuesday, referring to the Israeli Navy’s interception of the flotilla last year, when it took activists into custody.
Mr Avila strenuously denied the accusations in a statement to The Post.
“These allegations are obviously not true,” he said in a WhatsApp message while sailing off the coast of Spain.
“The ethics committee talked to all three people mentioned and they confirmed that this is just a smear campaign, that we are comrades and nothing ever happened.”
How are they “obviously” untrue? It appears none of the three women actually complained in the first place:
“In the absence of any complainant, witnesses or evidence, there was no basis for the matter to proceed,” the GSF spokesperson told The Post.
That doesn’t mean the sex didn’t happen – maybe it did, maybe it didn’t – but that no one complained about it. Even if the women complained later about the non-exclusivity of sex with Avila on this trip, this isn’t “sexual misconduct” in any normal sense of the term. This is not a power-dynamic violation, either. If it happened at all, it’s sex at an adult camp on water for self-absorbed twits where the ‘counselors’ get busy with the campers. It’s The Wet Hot Summer On the Seas, only with unattractive adults rather than celebrities playing teens.
If it did happen, though, Avila sounds like a cad or worse, the kind of “activist” who projects “comradeship” as a strategy to get into the pants of starry-eyed women On A Mission. If these leftist groups want no sex at their sleepovers, they’d better start separating men and women into separate boats. Given the nature of their mission, perhaps Heart of Falastin can start passing out burqas as part of the New Left Uniform for Liberated Women. That could solve the problem entirely.
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