by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
Gary Lineker’s sharing of a ‘Zionist rat’ on Instagram confirms the lethal ignorance of the cultural elites.
I thought Gary Lineker was a dab hand at spotting things that are reminiscent of the Nazi era? Perhaps someone can explain, then, why he shared an ‘anti-Zionist’ Instagram post that was illustrated with the rat emoji. The Jew as rodent, as vermin-like pest, as the lowest and most diseased of Earth’s beasts – it doesn’t get more Nazi era than that, Gary.
Lineker is in hot water after reposting an Instagram story from the anti-Israel campaign group, Palestine Lobby. It was a post featuring a video clip titled ‘Zionism explained in two minutes’. It was the usual Zio-bashing fare that faux-liberal midwits like Lineker mistake for daring commentary. Only it was worse this time, because the post came with a cartoon rodent, twitching its filthy tail.
You don’t need a PhD in the crimes of 20th-century Europe to feel alarmed – and sickened – by such an image. The vile likening of Jews with rats was all the rage in Nazi Germany. Goebbels pumped out propaganda depicting Jews as a rodent race that ‘carry contagion, flood the continent and devour precious resources’. Der Stürmer published cartoons of Jew-rats being exterminated. ‘When the vermin are dead’, one caption said, ‘the German oak will flourish once more’.