Generational malaise of girls gone bananas for guerrillas

The propensity for millennial and Gen Z women to take up their self-appointed, terrorist-chic, fashionable arms for Palestine has been well canvassed. What I want to ask goes deeper.

Pro-Palestine activists chant in Melbourne in December. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ David Crosling

The image I saw was jarring. A young girl, she couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15.

Such a lovely face. Beautiful, open smile. In her hands, a large poster that covered most of her torso. On it, a slogan of hate. It was a proclamation so vile that for a moment I questioned what I was seeing. The poster featured a masked terrorist, his head covered in a keffiyeh, a slit only for his eyes. He was carrying an automatic weapon of sorts, armed and ready. The text on the sign read: by any means necessary.

The young pro-Palestinian protester in Melbourne.

This young girl was one of thousands who marched in Melbourne against Israel on October 6, her image shared widely on the day and the days following on various social media platforms.

We have deliberately chosen not to show her face because this isn’t about one teenager carrying a hate-filled slogan on the streets of Australia in 2024. The image captured speaks to something so much wider, deeper and more disturbing.

By any means necessary: we all know what that’s alluding to. It’s alluding to the horrific acts of October 7 last year, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, and says they were justified. “By any means necessary” is a favourite slogan of the anti-Israel hate mobs globally. It says: whatever it takes. Ends justify the means. Rape, mutilation, kidnapping, summary executions, sexual violence, burning alive – all of it is fine. All of it is justifiable, because by any means necessary.

I’m not convinced a person of such tender years can understand fully the depraved nature of this statement and the weight of what it suggests. But we know from the events of the past 12 months that many scores, hundreds of thousands of women the world over know exactly what it means, and still choose to stand on the side of evil. Align themselves with the bad guys.

This picture bothered me for days and it took me a while to pinpoint the reason before I finally found myself asking: Have we lost a generation of women and girls? And if so, how?

When the war first started, the world was introduced to a woman called Johannah King-Slutzky.

She was, probably still is, an anti-Israel protester studying her PhD in English at Columbia University in New York and became a key face in the early days of student protests there. She also became notorious for asking the university administration to send food to the protesters, just a day after they illegally occupied buildings: “Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you?” She was serious. And seriously mocked from one part of the globe to another, justifiably so.

The propensity for millennial and Gen Z women to take up their self-appointed, terrorist-chic, fashionable arms for Palestine has been well canvassed since Iran, via its proxy Hamas, declared war on Israel a year ago. The psychology of this has been analysed and pulled apart.

Young women chant and wave flags during a pro-Palestinian rally in Melbourne last month. Picture: NewsWire/Tamati Smith.

What I want to ask goes deeper. What is it about the Gen Z and millennial young woman that makes her so prone to these flights of fancy? Is there an existential boredom here or does it speak to a broader lack of identity or substance and character? Is a generation of Western women so lacking in a sense of self that they seek to attach themselves to anything and everything else?

What else (apart from base level stupidity) would make a young woman simp for terrorists who, given the chance, would jail her or, in some countries, hang her or stone her for having sex outside of marriage? What makes a generation of women comfortable with surrendering their sex-based rights and expecting everyone else to do the same?

Is it this generation’s version of being obsessed with the romantic idea of the social justice revolutionary? Like Gen X women who ran about in Che Guevara T-shirts – private school girls do Viva la revolucion or something like that, ignorant of the fact Guevara was a vile homophobe, sadistic murderer and racist. The same person who helped establish the first Cuban concentration camp and confessed in a letter to his father: “I discovered that I really like killing.”

Late last month in Britain two young poppets called Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were sentenced to prison for throwing soup all over the Vincent van Gogh masterpiece Sunflowers.

They’d also glued their hands to the wall beneath the painting. My own view is they should have been left there until the glue wore off, but I’m just old school in that regard.

Plumber, who represented herself in court and copped a two-year jail term, declared: “It is not just myself being sentenced today … but the foundations of democracy itself.” What a terrifying mix of chutzpah and delusion.

Obviously, these examples represent the extreme of what I’m talking about here, but for every young woman who forms part of this posse, the question remains the same.

Perhaps we’ve lost a generation of young girls because in general the way has been paved so effectively by the generations of women who went before them. Because there is no appreciation for what their grandmothers and mothers have done for them, no understanding of how hard-fought and won the social and professional progress achieved. And of course in the current context, whacking on a keffiyeh and parading around the CBD on weekends doesn’t cost anything. It’s not like any of them will ever have to face extremism or live under its horrendous weight.

My mother’s generation fought for real things, like pay parity, no-fault divorce, the right to keep working after getting married.

The generation that followed took up the baton and kept running, the glass ceiling in our sights. We fought for better work-life balance. We fought to be seen as professional equals.

Perhaps we’re the new boomers and, to be quite honest, I would count that as a compliment because few generations have worked as hard, emerging from the chaos and destruction of World War II.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that progress in pay equity, agency and the like should be regressed, that would be nonsense. It is not what I am suggesting. I’m simply posing a question about the impact of having it too easy, too often.

When a person doesn’t have anything to strive for, no sense of identity or purpose of their own, where does that leave them? When a generation of girls is told they’re victims of their gender but concurrently given a golden ticket by virtue of having been born a girl in one of the most prosperous, free countries on earth, where does that leave a woman?

It reminds me of something someone told me a few months ago when our universities were being overrun by feral protesters with too much time on their hands, that their daughter, who was studying medicine, didn’t have hours in the day to indulge in protest cosplay. She was focused on her future.

When it comes to solutions, my cupboard is empty right now, but I do believe it’s a deeper issue rooted in having both purpose and a strong sense of identity, a sense of responsibility that trumps one of entitlement. Of all the things the collective village of women can instil in those younger than us, surely this is a critical place to start.