Mick Hartley

Camilla Long, in today's Sunday Times, on Lineker and the BBC:

Have you noticed, week in, week out, since the war in Gaza began, the corporation has been providing us with its own convulsing, mirror-image soap opera? You’d have thought that, just as children were being blown up — just as they were dying in their tiny thousands — BBC staffers might pause for a nanosecond from their busy diva/performative activist schedules/misinformation panels to perpetrate some actual journalism — like, say, verifying reports, stats, quotes etc with spokespeople who aren’t Hamas — but no.

Instead we’ve had weeks and weeks of people crying in the BBC toilets over the “dehumanising” of the Palestinians; dodgy articles/wild speculation by senior presenters at moments of high emotion (Jeremy Bowen’s hospital “Kalashnikovs”); staff writing to the director-general, Tim Davie, complaining that the BBC is complicit in “war propaganda”. How should they describe “Hamas”? “Terrorists”, of course, is the obvious, factually accurate answer — but isn’t “militants” more romantic, more sexy, more “our man in Marrakesh”? “Militants” it is, then. This debate went on for days….

Lineker, a BBC employee, has merrily failed to condemn Hamas atrocities and bigged up the marches; last week he retweeted a video by Owen Jones in which Israel was accused of committing “a textbook case of genocide”. I know Lineker is prone to messages like these (“1930s Germany”; “racism”), but is he at all aware that in saying this he’s an extremist now? Indeed, is the BBC?

If you spend your life on Twitter, as Gary does, then I guess you might not even notice your transition to extreme politics. It is an inevitable, natural career progression; it may feel almost cool. The language changes so fast: “conflicts” becomes “atrocities” becomes “genocide” — you wake up one morning a mere goateed presenter on Match of the Day; the next, you’re suddenly a left-wing Donald Trump, calling the world to jihad.

If you have no one telling you, “No, Gary, you’re an ex-footballer — don’t do the genocide tweet”, and you have no natural brain capacity/humility, then I suppose you have no reason not to fling around terms you do not understand that aren’t accurate and are deeply inflammatory. Lineker may slate Suella Braverman for saying the phrase “hate marches”, but I do not see any difference between this and Gary letting people think that everything he dislikes is “genocide”.

But that is what he is now — an extremist — by aligning himself with terrorists, praising the same things as Hamas. Is it thickness? Who knows? It’s only been a year since he mourned the “awful” death of an actual terrorist: he didn’t know the Palestinian Premier League player Ahmed Daraghmeh was in fact a “mujahid” for Hamas who died attacking people at a temple, but how could he have missed that? And couldn’t he have got some researcher at the BBC to check? Or were they all too busy putting up prose poems for Palestine on Instagram and writing nonsense paragraphs into the BBC guidelines?

It’s everywhere, this casual politicisation of now very grave matters by the dense, shallow and wrong: Palestine is a fashionable coat that people like Lineker put on out of insecurity/arrogance/vanity, without fully understanding it or caring to find out…

How, by the way, have we got to a point where the whole of café society is suddenly drawn to jihad? I suppose people like Lineker will do anything to maintain their privilege — it is how they cope with the empty evil within.

See also: former BBC Director and Controller of BBC One Danny Cohen on the BBC's long-standing bias against Israel.