Gary Lineker epitomises the ignorance of the new Left
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If I were to draw up a list of people whose thoughts on Israel-Palestine are worth listening to, I think Gary Lineker would be at the bottom. Or certainly near the bottom. A bloke best known for commentating on football and advertising crisps? Yeah, I think I’ll muddle through without hearing his views on a complex tussle over land and liberty that’s been raging for decades.
The Match of the Day presenter’s unsuitability as a moral guide to the Middle East was confirmed at the weekend, when he retweeted a cry for Israel to be booted out of international football tournaments. The tweet cited the Palestinian Football Association’s belief that Fifa should show Israel the red card until it ceases its “grave violations of international law”.
Lineker’s sharing of this Israel-bashing propaganda with his 8.9m followers on X (formerly Twitter) caused a stink. As it should. It is out of order for the top football pundit at the supposedly impartial Beeb to amplify such a partisan assault on the Jewish State.
Then there’s the hypocrisy. Lineker was happy to swan about in Qatar for the World Cup in 2022. That’s a state that oppresses women, persecutes homosexuals and has hosted Hamas leaders. So countries that fund Hamas are cool, but countries that fight against Hamas are not? Make it make sense, Gary.
While in Qatar, he anchored the Iran-England game. This was when Iran’s theocratic tyrants were slaughtering their own citizens for the “crime” of protesting against the mandatory hijab law. In the morally inverted universe of the virtue-signaller, a state that massacres women for demanding equality can carry on playing football, but a state that fights back against a terror group that butchered more than a thousand of its citizens cannot.
At least Hamas fanboys seemed to appreciate Lineker’s tweeting. The Quds News Network – a media agency which has been described as “Hamas-affiliated” – gushed over the “renowned English broadcaster” who called for “Israel to be banned” from football.
It gets worse. Lineker later deleted his retweet, because, according to sources, he “did not understand what he was sharing”. What? Can he not read? Did he not see the words “suspend Israel’s membership [of FIFA]”?
Lineker’s back-covering is even more alarming than his original retweet because it suggests there is a whole lot of ignorance in today’s grandstanding over Israel-Palestine.
That a famous man with nearly nine million followers can breezily retweet some Israel-bashing, even though he apparently did not understand it, is a testament to the ill-informed nature of “pro-Palestine” preening. We’ve had Queers for Palestine and Artists for Palestine. Now behold the largest, loudest strain in this movement – Dummies for Palestine.
Dummies for Palestine are everywhere. Consider the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”: many of the youths hollering this slogan don’t even know which river and sea it refers to. A survey of college students in the US found that 86 per cent supported the chant, but only 47 per cent knew it referred to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. One thought it was a reference to the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.
Less than a quarter of respondents knew who Yasser Arafat was. Deliciously, more than 10 per cent thought he was the first Prime Minister of Israel. (Don’t tweet about Prime Minister Arafat, Mr Lineker – it’s not correct.)
The Wall St Journal, which commissioned the survey, observed that “those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences”. Indeed. This might explain why we’ve seen woke youths marching in London alongside Islamists wearing Hamas-style headgear and radicals screaming for more jihad against the Jewish State. Because they are ignorant. They think Hamas is a resistance movement when in truth it is a virulently anti-Semitic, misogynistic and homophobic sect that would happily throw these blue-haired Brits in jail.
Nowhere is the ignorance of Israel hate better captured than in Queers for Palestine. These are the original Dummies for Palestine. As the writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out, that gay, genderfluid kids in the West are lining up behind a movement that would execute them given half a chance shows how “stupid” our society has become. “Educate yourself!”, woke activists love to yell. Straight back at ya, guys – please learn a thing or two about this complex conflict you tweet about morning, noon and night.
I appreciated the quiet fury of Thomas Hand on Piers Morgan Uncensored this week. He’s the Irish-Israeli whose nine-year-old daughter, Emily, was kidnapped by Hamas. She has since been released. Asked about the activist class that rages against Israel, Hand said: “They don’t know a thing.” They don’t know history, or even geography, he said. “You idiots”, he cried, exasperated: “Have you been to Israel, ever?”
Here here. We’ve all had a gutful of their cluelessness that masquerades as virtue, the dangerous chants that they don’t even understand. Stupidity is the soil that fanaticism takes root in – educate yourselves before it’s too late.
