Why do liberals like Gary Lineker insist on talking about things they know nothing about?
This is one narrative running about his departure, and I recognise it absolutely because Gary is the kind of liberal type I know very well indeed. I do not dislike the man, or claim to know anything about football. He helped me out once by offering Match of the Day tickets for a raffle I was doing to support JK Rowling's charity Lumos, which was working with institutionalised children in Ukraine. I had to ask him where Match of the Day was. Apparently in a TV studio!
Sometimes he would retweet a column of mine from The Guardian. At that time, migrants were being called vermin and cockroaches in our tabloid press, and that disgusted me. These people were drowning, and we were watching it on our TV screens. To call another human 'vermin' is to dehumanise them, to make it legitimate to kill them.
It is just this sort of dehumanising, though, that has done for him. An Instagram post that he shared last week featured an anti-Zionist rant by a Canadian-Palestinian professor accompanied by a rat emoji. That Jews are rats, vermin, is an anti-Semitic trope and no nitpicking over the lines between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism excuses it.
While Lineker says he is moved to speak out over humanitarian causes, let's agree not to compare humans to vermin for a start. The whole issue here is that guys like Lineker do not know the complexity of this issue and never seem to want to be schooled by those that do. There have been some extraordinary exchanges over the past months where Lineker has been challenged by Simon Schama on Jewish history.
Of course, it is possible to understand that this awful situation is complex as well as be appalled at the death and horrific destruction of Gaza. That is where most people are at, surely? How is a two-state solution possible when Hamas remains in power? Those who think Israel should not exist in the first place – and there are many – are going to have to explain what happens to half of the world's Jewish population who live there.
Lineker told the journalist Mehdi Hasan, 'I've got no skin in the game… I see it from a neutral perspective.' Wow. This is the ultimate liberal delusion; that somehow one sits aloft, above others who cannot see what is good and what is bad. Those who do not agree with him have had an empathy bypass. This is exactly the kind of polarisation that social media has engendered, I'm afraid. There live the self-proclaimed good and everyone else is, well, a little unhuman.
Lineker will be just fine. He is hugely rich and his podcast empire is another echo chamber of guys reassuring each other that they are on the right side of history.
Graham Norton, while hosting Eurovision the other night, somehow managed not to tell the audience what the Israeli contestant, a Nova festival survivor, had been through. Silence is complicity?
It's always interesting, with these dudes, which issues they choose to be brave about and which they don't. Lineker has chosen Israel/Gaza but has repeatedly ignored pleas from women to say something about biological men in sport. He has refused to take a line. And when challenged by The Telegraph's Oliver Brown in an interview last week came out with: 'It's too nuanced. I don't actually think, in terms of sport, that it will ever be a real issue. Sport, as it's already doing, will sort it out and work out rules.' He made his sympathies clear. 'They're some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You've got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue?'.
At this point a lot of us realised exactly who had an empathy bypass. If you are going to make public pronouncements you can at least educate yourself. Lineker is entitled to his views and is an incredibly talented presenter, but I am afraid he does have 'skin in the game' as the BBC is publicly funded.
He cannot present himself as 'neutral' in one context and 'brave' in another. Free from them, he can tweet away about whatever atrocities he likes and, I am sad to say, there are places other than Israel in the world where terrible things are happening. Sudan?
He has the time to find out himself about what is going on. As he is just a guy trying to do the right thing after all. He just did an anti-Semitic thing by accident. Isn't that always the way?
The fall from the moral high ground will be cushioned, I am sure, by like-minded apologists who cheer him on. Some humility would be in order. But these guys never know what they don't know. See Alastair Campbell/Rory Stewart on any issue that involves women's rights and who just happen to be part of Lineker's podcast empire.
As I say, it's a type. If only I had their conceit, I could offer myself up as an expert football commentator. After all, I have a lot of empathy with people who score own goals.
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