Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman, in today's Sunday Times, has some views on Gary Lineker:

“It’s beyond depraved, what they’re going through,” he said last week about the Palestinians in Gaza, which is absolutely true. But a mere few days later he had to apologise after retweeting a video about the evils of “Zionists”, accompanied by an image of a rat, which he later deleted. Some have suggested the criticism of Lineker was overblown — how was he meant to know it was antisemitic, they said, as if a rat alongside an anti-Israel video was some kind of impenetrable ancient code, a rigged trap set to trip up a good man. “I think if you are silent on these issues, you are complicit,” he said, meaning the starvation of Gaza. This is a great justification for wasting time on Twitter, although it does then lead to accusations that you are complicit in anything you don’t tweet about — like, say, October 7, which prompted this incisive tweet from Lineker on the day: “Super Spurs are top of the league.” As Lineker put it himself in last week’s interview: “You either have empathy or you don’t.”…

“People say it’s a complex issue, but I don’t think it is,” Lineker said about football-I-mean-Gaza. Not since Jared Kushner was dispatched to “fix” the Middle East (how’d that turn out, anyway?) have I heard such naivety expressed with such confidence. But what is complicated, according to Lineker, is the question of males (aka trans women) in women’s sport. When asked why he — a former sportsman, I believe — has stayed uncharacteristically silent on that matter, he replied: “You can’t cover a subject like that in a post. It’s too nuanced.” Israel is simple; men in women’s sport is complicated: it could be the centrist dad mantra.

Lineker, though, lives in the BBC bubble – where his views, I would guess, are absolutely mainstream. Trans people are the most persecuted people on earth – this as an excuse for not going into the trans women in women's sport debate – and no one in the world is suffering as much as Gaza children, bombed for no good reason by the horrible Zionists. Unfortunately he has this urge to show what a nice guy he is – plus he's not interested in exploring stuff in any depth – so he keeps putting his foot in it. 

Hard to summon up any sympathy.