Former professional footballer, English sports broadcaster, and Israel-hater Gary Lineker has been interviewed by The New Statesmen. And in the interview, he addresses allegations he is antisemitic.
Lineker monitors events in the Middle East and the war in Gaza. He follows on Instagram a ten-year-old girl named Renad Attallah who lives in the besieged Strip and posts about her life there. He has spoken before of how pictures and footage of people’s suffering inside the Strip have made him “cry on a regular basis”.
“They still do,” he told me. “It’s just got worse and worse, hasn’t it? There’s nothing we can do. You feel a bit helpless. I mean, it’s awful. I don’t know how you can be on a side on this, other than the side of the children and the side of the women and the innocent people that are being killed constantly now. Yes, same sympathies on October 7, and before October 7 there were things that happened, but what’s going on now is just…”
His voice faded and he lowered his head. He mentioned Attallah again. “If something happened to her” – his eyes filled with tears – “I’d genuinely… she’s a brilliant little chef, and so sweet, you think [he whispers]: ‘Fuck, how could people kill these people? How can they do that? How can you even contemplate – it’s fucking awful.”
I ask him if he has ever messaged her on Instagram.
“You can, yes, and I’ve donated and stuff like that, because she’s brilliant. She’s become more than an influencer – she’s got four, five million followers or something silly [in fact, she has just under one million], but you just think, ‘God, every night she goes to bed it might happen, or she gets shot in the street.’ It’s not about anti-Semitism – it’s about anti- the killing of innocent women, children and men as well. I just want it to stop.’”
His stance on the Israel-Gaza war has led to accusations that he is anti-Israeli and ignorant of the deeper context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He pushed back. “I’m anti-Israel government. I’m not in the slightest bit anti-Semitic. I’m not anti-anybody. I am anti-bad people, and there are really bad people involved in this. Eventually, whether it’s five years’, ten years’, 20 years’ time, I think we’ll look at that and we’ll see it the same way as Iraq times ten. I do, I just genuinely do.”
As Lineker watches the suffering of victims of war and conflict everywhere, he believes the world has entered a “dark period”. And he regrets the British government is not more influential in the Middle East. “We’re a powerless little country really, now. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, whether they’re trying. I’m sure they are: they must be. It’s easy to be critical when you don’t know what’s going on.”
Lineker’s responses are rather telling.
For a start, the fact he exaggerated the Gazan influencer’s following by four or five times speaks volumes as to his attention to details and devotion to the truth, or rather lack thereof. No wonder he will take the ridiculously inflated casualty figures from Hamas’ Ministry of Health – as well as other anti-Israel lies – as Gospel.
Then there’s his final statement above:
“We’re a powerless little country really, now. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, whether they’re trying. I’m sure they are: they must be. It’s easy to be critical when you don’t know what’s going on.”
Shame he doesn’t take his own advice when it comes to Israel. Funny thing that.
Is Linker antisemitic? I don’t know for sure, but the double standard is quite astounding, as this February piece from Nicole Lampert also demonstrates:
I spluttered that I thought he was behaving like an antisemite. His X feed only showed one side of the issue. He’d never once condemned Hamas on X or sent a message about the hostages.
“I’m thinking about the women hostages who are probably still being raped,” I said. “I’m thinking about the babies being killed,” he countered. “I just want peace.”
I told him that we all wanted peace and that there had been peace until October 7. He said the situation was complicated – “the conflict” – and I said that complication included the actions of Iran. He told me that he believed Jewish people were suffering because of the actions of the Netanyahu government; I told him that no government would behave differently when so many members of their nation had been killed, whatever one thought of Netanyahu.
The arguments I’ve had so many times on social media with trolls were suddenly being spouted by one of the most famous faces in Britain. For example: we never bombed Dublin when the IRA was bombing us (er, the IRA weren’t in control of Dublin and they never vowed to wipe out every English person).
I told him how much I was hurting at the way he – so powerful with his nine million followers – was encouraging a narrative that the weekly hate marches feed on. I also said that, as someone who has interviewed many hostage families, I could not understand why they did not seem to warrant a single mention.
He asked how he could do it without attracting more hatred on his own feed; how was he meant to do it? I shrugged, said “post a photo of a hostage” and told him about the thousands of trolls I get who call me a Nazi, Zio bitch, a liar and a murderer. We all get trolls.
He said that he wasn’t tweeting on October 7 – and when he looked at Twitter on October 8 he was surprised to find that he was trending. He made out that he was trying to only retweet neutral things. I explained that people whose tweets he’d liked had red triangles in their names and that signified a support for Hamas. He didn’t know, he said.
Lineker is supposedly “anti-bad people” yet hasn’t spoken out against October 7 just because he is worried about hatred on his own feed, while incessantly tweeting the worst anti-Israel stuff?
I guess in Lineker’s worldview, only Jews can be bad people.
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