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Indian Express
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
How a rat-emoji cost veteran football presenter Gary Lineker his BBC job
In his storied football career that spanned two decades, British footballer Gary Lineker never received a sanction, neither a yellow nor a red card, a remarkable achievement for someone who had turned up for 573 games for five clubs and 80 times for England, netted 331 goals and bagged the Golden Boot in the 1986 World Cup. But three decades after his last competitive game, twenty-six years and 45,086 shows into hosting the 'Match of the Day' show on BBC, he was red-carded from the programme for his alleged antisemitic comments on social media. He apologised for both his post as well as his ignorance and indiscretion, but it was a step too late to salvage his proposed last dance during the World Cup next year. It was inevitable, because while he was sagacious in the studio, he managed to attract a steady stream of controversy with his politically opinionated statements. His latest faux pas that expedited his BBC exit was him reposting a material titled 'Zionism explained in less than 2 mins' with a rat emoji on Instagram. The post was originally sent from a Palestine lobby account, English media reported. When outrage escalated, he apologised, saying, 'I would never knowingly share anything antisemitic. It goes against everything I believe in.' In 1927, the rat became an antisemitic image after Der Stürmer, Nazi Germany's most influential propaganda sheet, published a cover page of Nazis gassing rats with the caption. 'When the vermin are dead, the German oak will flourish once more.' But this was not the first time he made an error in judgment, a trait antithetical to his on-field persona, where his strikes were precise and measured. From Brexit and the government's asylum policies to BBC editorial stands and sports-washing in the Qatar World Cup, he has been vocal about every cause under the sun. While most of them conformed to the invisible lines of sensitivity, he trampled this on occasion, spurring the BBC to devise editorial guidelines for personal use of social media. He explained his rationale in an interview with The Guardian: 'Twitter has sparked my public politicisation. Until Twitter emerged, I never voiced my views. Politics at the moment is a shambles. It's divided and it's tribal and it's depressing.' The bigger impact on the BBC For the BBC, axing their star anchor, the costliest on the BBC's payroll, is hardly an issue since they could hire another luminary using their financial resources. Neither is it about Lineker being jobless. He has a popular podcast and already has a host of offers on his table. There is a larger concern about the once (perceived) benchmark of objective journalism leaning towards rampant censoring and intolerance to anything against the government, or the wider global issues, embodied by the indiscretion in handling the Israel-Palestine conflict. Lineker's dismissal comes at a time when the credibility and neutrality of the BBC had come under fire after it pulled from the air the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, after it emerged that its narrator, a 13-year-old, was the son of the deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas government. Incidentally, he had vociferously protested against removing the aforementioned documentary from iPlayer as well as the government's increasingly stringent immigration laws. A few years ago, political commentator Peter Oborne's columns were stopped because he wrote a scathing piece against the Boris Johnson government. Shots on show When his childhood club Leicester City lifted the Premier League title in 2016, a fairy tale unmatched in the league, he came to the post-match show shirtless, in just white bloomers, ripping apart his favoured style code of a grey jacket and white buttoned-up shirt. He was forced to strip after a prediction midway through the season where he proclaimed to 'do the MOTD in undies' if his childhood club Leicester City, won the Premier League. So they did, and the club's greatest product kept his word. Well, nearly. More scandalously, he pulled out a live 'sex-noise prank' during an FA Cup match between Wolves and Liverpool in 2023. He was performing his hosting duties when pornographic noises were heard on the TV, with no one knowing where it was coming from. Lineker revealed on social media that the noise had come from a phone stuck to the couch, with celebrity prankster 'Jarvo', the pitch invader during cricket matches, taking credit for it. However, he had to apologise thrice to the Corporation executives. But for all his attempts to be funny, his reflections on the game were without flourishes, a more accurate reflection of his playing days. A lethal goal-scorer In the box, he was always at the right place at the right time. He was not a great dribbler, header, passer or even striker of the ball, and his goals are more memorable for their effect than execution. But he had an immaculate sense of the goal. He roved between the lines, hid behind the defenders, sped past them with explosive pace to receive crosses and slapped/tapped/nicked the ball past the goalkeeper. It was the fate of his career—he was always at the wrong place at the wrong time to amass trophies. Despite netting 283 goals in 573 games, split between Leicester City, Everton, Barcelona, Tottenham Hotspur and Nagoya Grampus Eight of the Japanese J-1 League, and winning a treasure chest of individual awards, most notably the Golden Boot in the 1986 World Cup, he never hoisted a league trophy or a European Championship. But three decades after his last game, he finally received the first red card of his life.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Yahoo
Nazis stole this Holocaust victim's books. How his grandson unexpectedly got them back
Not one for emotion, opening the four boxes that arrived at his Salt Lake City home from Germany overwhelmed Amos Guiora. Each contained a leather-bound book embossed in Hebrew with the name Shlomo Natan Goldberg, his paternal grandfather who died in Auschwitz on May 26, 1944. 'There are no words,' Guiora said, sitting in his living room with the books stacked on the coffee table in front of him. How the books made their way from his grandfather's suitcase confiscated in the selection line at the infamous death camp in Poland into the hands of a notorious Nazi in Germany is a mystery. As part of an effort to wipe out Jewish culture, Nazis looted books from Jewish owners, libraries, universities and private collections. Many of the items were destroyed, but some were saved for institutions the Nazis planned to establish in order to study and 'scientifically' prove Jewish inferiority, according to Jewish Insider. After World War II ended in Nazi defeat, thousands of stolen books were left abandoned for decades. Leibl Rosenberg, an official representative of the Jewish community in Nuremberg, Germany, has dedicated his life to finding descendants of the rightful owners of 9,000 books looted from victims of the Nazi regime and discovered in Julius Streicher's library at the end of the war. Streicher was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer. He was convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1946. Rosenberg, a former journalist, has spent nearly three decades researching the provenance of the books, which are currently housed at the Nuremberg Municipal Library, according to Jewish Insider. The books are not author's copies or library copies, but tend to belong to everyday people, he said in a 2021 interview posted at Arolsen Archives. 'It was by no means only scholars, rabbis, priests, bibliophiles, collectors and dealers who were robbed. Perfectly ordinary citizens were targeted too, neighbors, friends, and relatives — people you knew, people you had dealings with, people who went about their daily lives alongside you and whose names are now forgotten," Rosenberg said. About 3,700 of the books contain notes or writing of some kind and he was able to match them to about 2,200 people or institutions, he said. Books that belonged to those who were murdered or died in the Holocaust take on greater significance when they're returned to living family members. 'Sometimes this can lead to very emotional scenes, which also touch me deeply at a personal level,' said Rosenberg, the son of Polish Jews. Dozens of volunteers for the project have tracked down 87 heirs in the past three months, including Guiora. Born in Israel in 1957, Guiora never met his paternal grandparents, Shlomo and Therese Goldberg, both of whom were killed at Auschwitz. He is the only child of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Alexander and Susie Guiora, who referred to herself as a 'Holocaust victor.' He has seen a picture of his grandmother but not his grandfather. His parents shared little information with him about their experiences. When he was 12, his father took him canoeing and told him that 'in one minute I'll tell you my story and in one minute I'll tell you your mother's story, and this is the first and last time we'll ever have this conversation.' Alexander Guiora did acknowledge his ordeal once when as an 'impertinent' 15-year-old Guiora asked him why he didn't play golf or tennis or ski like other parents. Without raising his voice, his father replied, 'I survived the Holocaust. Don't you think that is enough exercise?' The elder Guiora gave a speech at a conference in Budapest sponsored by the Catholic Church about its role in the Holocaust. He focused on Jewish-Christian reconciliation. He never mentioned the word Holocaust. Holocaust scholars have described it as the greatest speech ever given by a Holocaust survivor. A University of Utah law professor who splits his time between Salt Lake City and Israel, Guiora wrote a book about the Holocaust, 'The Crime of Complicity: The Bystander in the Holocaust,' which includes his parents' experiences gleaned from other sources and interviews. Guiora's mother never told him that like Anne Frank she lived in an attic in Budapest where an elderly Catholic woman brought her food every day. At age 12, she twice survived Hungarian Nazi collaborators taking her and her mother from the home to be shot. His father never told him he led a group of men from a work camp in Serbia on a 134-kilometer trek in the winter over the Carpathian Mountains to safety in Bulgaria without any navigation tools. The elder Guiora eventually made his way to Palestine. The unexpected discovery of his grandfather's books has given Guiora another sliver of light into his family history. But he doesn't quite know what to make of it. Did life come full circle? Did it bring things home? Does he keep two books in Utah and two in Israel? It's so fresh and new that he doesn't really know what to do, 'so for now let them rest and then we'll see.' It might be enough just to have something tangible from the past. 'If you think about it, that's remarkable. It is actually an incredible story,' Guiora said. 'In the age of Holocaust denial, I think anything that we can show or demonstrate that this actually did happen is really important.' Guiora was at his house just outside Jerusalem when he received an email late at night last December from an amateur genealogist working with the Looted Books Project, a joint initiative of JewishGen's Kalikow Genealogy Center at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Leo Baeck Institute, both in New York. He didn't recognize the sender but the subject line got his attention: Shlomo Natan Goldberg. It was only the second time he'd seen his grandfather's name. The first was on a Holocaust memorial in his grandfather's hometown of Nyiregyháza, Hungary, along with the names of 10,000 other Jews from the town killed at Auschwitz. The email and subsequent emails contained a series of questions to verify Guiora's identity and relationship to Goldberg. Guiora's father changed his surname from Goldberg to Guiora on the advice that Holocaust survivors should take an Israeli last name to put the past behind them. Guiora said the genealogists' effort to find him was 'detective work at its very finest.' In 1981, Alexander Guiora filled out forms identifying himself as a Holocaust survivor and recorded testimony of Goldberg's death at Israel's Yad Vashem — The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. When Alexander Guiora, a University of Michigan psychology professor, died in 2015, the university wrote a tribute about him. The last line noted his son, Amos, was a University of Utah law professor. A simple Google search led genealogists to Guiora's email address. The four volumes containing explanations and interpretations of Jewish law found in the Talmud arrived at his home last Friday at the expense of the German government. It appears the text was written between 1670 and 1675 but not printed until 1880. 'To tell you that I am eternally grateful would be an all-time understatement. This is the only thing I have of him, of my grandfather,' Guiora said. Guiora slept only two hours the night the books arrived because he was so excited to touch them again. 'It's so visceral, maybe that's the word, to have this,' he said. He has thought a lot the past few days about how his father would have reacted to seeing the books. He said he thinks the terrible reality of Auschwitz 'would have hit him smack in the face.' Last month, Guiora spoke to 1,000 students at Eisenhower Junior High School in Taylorsville about the Holocaust and his grandparents and parents. He said speaking to kids about his experience is challenging and important. 'As a second-generation Holocaust survivor, one of my greatest fears is that the Holocaust will be put in the dustbin of history,' he said in an S.J. Quinney College of Law article by Lindsay Wilcox published after his visit. Guiora said the students asked 'intelligent and powerful' questions such as whether he was empathetic to his parents' travails and whether he could have survived the Holocaust if he were alive then. A teacher at the school, Amy Burgon-Hill, described Guiora's speech about his parents as vulnerable and honest, not condescending or preachy. 'He is able to help my students see that there are people beyond them and that my students are not the only ones who struggle. He does not share his parents' story in a way that suggests students have it so easy. It is an acknowledgement of this horrible and hard thing that happened, but that people survived and they thrived,' she said in the article. Guiora received 700 thank you notes from the students. They now hang in a frame on the wall in his study. He is going back soon to help the students write papers about the Holocaust. He has something new to share with them. 'I think there's a certain symmetry, if you will, that the books arrived shortly after I met with these kids,' Guiora said. 'This for me is one of those moments in life, if I may, I hate the word overwhelming, but overwhelming.'
Fox News
24-02-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
My father survived the Holocaust. Censorship didn't stop the Nazis, it helped them
In 1944, my father was arrested in Berlin for the double crime of being half-Jewish and a Hitler opponent. He was imprisoned and enslaved in the infamous Buchenwald camp, where he barely survived the Nazis' brutal program of "extermination through labor," and had been scheduled for involuntary sterilization. To his great fortune — and mine — American troops liberated Buchenwald one day before that scheduled procedure. I have dedicated my life to defending free speech because history demonstrates that it is the most essential engine for securing human rights. But if CBS's "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan had been correct, when she claimed last week that "free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide" in Germany, that would be a powerful argument for censorship. Sadly, she was wrong. In fairness to Brennan, she was repeating an all too common assumption: that the Nazis rose to power during Germany's Weimar Republic because of its tolerance of their hateful rhetoric. But the historical record belies this assumption, which is why it is often called the "Weimar fallacy." In fact, there were laws criminalizing hateful, discriminatory speech in Weimar Germany. These laws were strictly enforced, including against leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Julius Streicher, and even Hitler himself. Hundreds of Nazi agitators were found guilty of group libel, incitement to "class" violence, and insults to religious communities. Similar bans on Nazi radio programs, newspapers, rallies and speeches led to countless prosecutions. No matter how positive their intentions, these German hate speech laws backfired into a public relations coup for the Nazis, who claimed they were being punished for speaking truth to power. For example, Streicher's virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer became more popular the more it was confiscated. The speaking ban on Hitler led to posters depicting him as a free speech martyr, with his mouth taped shut and the text complaining that "He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany." What's worse, once the Nazis seized power, they used these very same laws to silence and jail their opponents. This experience illustrates an inherent flaw of any restrictions on so-called hate speech: because that concept is inescapably subjective, the enforcing authorities are given the power to suppress essentially any speech — and as a result endangering any speech that is unpopular with powerful interest groups. Sadly, we need look no further than Germany itself for examples of contemporary hate speech laws predictably going awry. Recently, six German police officers conducted a dawn raid of a man's house because of his mocking tweet about a government official's hypocritical conduct — a classic example of dissenting speech that is the lifeblood of any democratic government. In 2024, pro-Palestinian rallies were shut down over concerns about the potential for hate speech — even though the suppressed messages were in a foreign language. Especially troubling is Germany's regular punishment of any message that contains so-called "hateful speech," even if the message satirizes and condemns it. For example, in 2021, the Cologne public prosecutor initiated proceedings against Cologne's mayor and a member of its Jewish community because of their tweets sharing a photograph of an anti-Semitic poster. The intention was to decry the ongoing problem of anti-Semitism, which is why the tweet's accompanying message read, "Anyone who thinks that way has no business in Cologne or anywhere else in our society." Still, the public prosecutor said it was his duty to investigate because German law absolutely bars any distribution of hate speech, regardless of its intent. Likewise, Germany's strict Internet censorship law, which went into effect in 2018, was swiftly used to punish not only anti-immigrant tweets by leaders of Germany's far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, but also tweets by journalists and human rights activists that satirized and criticized them. The speaking ban on Hitler led to posters depicting him as a free speech martyr, with his mouth taped shut and the text complaining that "He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany." The steady rise of the AfD party in political support and power, despite Germany's strict censorial regime, tragically mirrors the events of the Weimar period: Censoring the hateful, hated messages doesn't suppress the underlying ideas. In fact, they may even amplify them. I literally owe my life to the end of the Holocaust. If evidence showed that censorship could have averted it, I would support censorship. But there is no such evidence. Rather than attempt to censor speech we loathe and whose consequences we fear, all of us who oppose bigotry and discrimination have a moral duty to raise our voices vigorously against it. We cannot suppress hatred by silencing its expression. We must confront it head-on. There are no shortcuts.
