Accusing Israel of genocide is despicable doublethink
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
Gary Lineker’s Israel-bashing has exposed the moral rot of the woke West.
[…] Yes, as if Israel hadn’t suffered enough at the murderous hands of Hamas, now it must endure the indignity of a football pundit wondering out loud if it might be guilty of the worst war crime of all. What next, Wayne Rooney sitting in judgement on the Democratic Republic of Congo? ‘Worth 13 minutes of anyone’s time’, said the Match of the Day presenter turned amateur Hague sleuth in his retweet of a conversation between the Guardian’s Owen Jones and Raz Segal, an associate professor of genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey. In that chat, Segal says that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a ‘textbook genocide’. Textbook. That is, it conforms precisely to the definition of genocide, which is the murder of a large number of people from an ethnic group with the aim of destroying that ethnic group. This is what Lineker is sharing to his 8.9million followers on X. The lie that the Jewish State has a bloodlust to vaporise all Palestinians.
This is serious, no? Mr Lineker is a representative of Britain’s public broadcaster, the BBC. He is the face of BBC Sport. Did he not stop to think how the Jewish section of the public might feel about his sharing of a clip damning Israel as genocidal? Did it not cross his mind that our Jewish citizens who are compelled to pay his wages might now feel a lesser part of ‘the public’ that the Beeb is meant to embody? The vast majority of British Jews support Israel (if not the Netanyahu government). They consider it ‘the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people’. Call me a contrarian, but I think people paid by the public to provide a service to the public ought not to alienate any section of that public by sharing inflammatory ideological claims.
We can now see how stunningly lacking in virtue the virtue-signallers are. When Hamas fascists launched their pogrom against Israel on 7 October, Lineker said nothing. On the day itself, this bloke who loves to wring his hands over bad things said nowt about the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. He did find time to congratulate Spurs for getting to the top of the league, though. The next day, too, not a whisper. Finally, on 9 October, he said something. Kind of. He tweeted a link to a new episode of The Rest is Politics in which his mates, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, talked about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Given his keen interest in events that apparently echo the 1930s – he famously accused then home secretary Suella Braverman of using ‘language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’ – it was striking he had so little to say about an atrocity that really did echo the 1930s.
Yet now Mr Lineker is not so quiet. Now he invites his millions of followers to watch a prof accuse Israel of genocide.
Read also: Gary Lineker must be out to destroy the BBC by Robin Aitken, Telegraph. He’s become the BBC’s most dangerous friend: every time Lineker opens his mouth he gives ammunition to the Corporation’s enemies
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