|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[SPECIAL JANUARY PROMOTION: Spend $50+ In The FPM Store And Receive A Free Copy Of “Final Battle” By David Horowitz.]
Gary Lineker is a former soccer star who is now a sports broadcaster for the BBC. Judging by his postings on social media, outside of sports, he has an obsessive interest in Israel and what, according to him, are the Jewish state’s many crimes. He’s a great supporter of BDS. He parrots the chant “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free,” which, properly understood, calls for the obliteration of the Jewish state and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab one. Now the columnist Brendan O’Neill has taken Lineker to task for his anti-Israel animus. More on O’Neill’s onslaught on Lineker can be found here: “Gary Lineker and the bigotry of the virtue-signallers,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, January 15, 2024:
Yesterday, Israeli footballer Sagiv Jehezkel was suspended by his club in Turkey and then arrested by Turkish cops. His crime? During a game on Saturday he held up his clenched fist, wrapped in a bandage, where he’d written the words: ‘100 days. 7/10.’ He was commemorating the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. He was using his football stardom to remind people of the Israeli hostages still in captivity. He was saying, in essence, Jewish lives matter. For this, his club, Antalyaspor, dumped him, and the police nabbed him. He is being investigated, said Turkey’s justice minister, for making an ‘ugly gesture’ that could incite ‘people to hatred and hostility’.
What have Britain’s showily virtuous footballers had to say about this grim act of Israelophobia? Our painfully right-on footballing clique who’ve been taking the knee and crying ‘Black Lives Matter!’ for the past three years – surely they have a view on this tyrannical assault on a footballer whose only offence was to show concern for the Jews still being held by the fascists of Hamas? Those managers and players who ostentatiously genuflected for George Floyd must be piping up for their colleague who merely spoke up for the vastly higher numbers of Israelis who were murdered and kidnapped by racists – right?
Nope. Not a word. Crickets. In fact, it’s worse than that. Gary Lineker, the king of preening football stars, the maestro of dispensing milquetoast views to the tragic middle classes of Twitter, did say something about Israeli football at the weekend. He retweeted the view that Israel should be banned from international games. He shared a tweet saying FIFA should ‘suspend Israel’s membership’ and ‘ban it from international tournaments’ until it ‘ends its grave violations of international law’. There you have it: as Turkey was booting out an Israeli footballer, Britain’s best-known virtue-signalling prick seemed to suggest that Israel as a whole should be booted out of football.
Behold the Turkey-Lineker alliance. The world’s weirdest pincer movement. On one side, the hotheads of an Islamist-ruled nation who cannot abide the sight of an Israeli sportsman criticising Hamas. And on the other, a pompous sports broadcaster wondering out loud if Israel should be shown the red card [meaning: “You’re out.”] by the footballing establishment. As a footballer faces interrogation and damnation for showing solidarity with Israel, Britain’s self-styled guardian of sporting virtue ignites a furious online discussion about ridding football of Israel’s wicked presence. It is unforgivable.
Lineker’s retweet has caused a storm. He shared a comment from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which cited the Palestinian Football Association’s view that FIFA should take ‘an urgent stance towards Israel’s grave violations of human rights’. So the Beeb’s top sports commentator is now openly promoting BDS bigotry. BDS, which stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, is a nasty campaign beloved of the lazy bourgeoisie that singles out the world’s only Jewish state for the most severe forms of cultural and economic sanction. For a figurehead of the supposedly impartial BBC to push such a partisan and, in my view, prejudiced ideology is iffy in the extreme….
For Gary Lineker, Iran poses no problems. He is happy to watch, and even acting as a BBC commentator on, Iranian soccer teams. He appears to be unaffected by the Tehran regime that has executed thousands of political prisoners, has murdered hundreds of girls who failed to wear, or wore incorrectly, their hijabs, has stoned adulterers to death, and hangs homosexuals from cranes.
I would wager that many Brits with dual Israeli citizenship, or just British Jews who have an affinity with Israel, now feel even more isolated from the public broadcaster following Lineker’s promotion of BDS bigotry. Seriously, Gary – do you have no shame?
No, Gary Lineker has no shame because he deeply believes in the wickedness of the Jewish state. Gary Lineker, one of the most important broadcasters at the BBC, is clearly obsessed with the evil of Israel — an obsession such as his rises to the level of antisemitism. In the more than 100 days since the attacks of October 7, he has refused to condemn Hamas for its rapes, tortures, and murders. Instead, he promotes the cutting off of all economic and cultural ties to the Israeli state and Israeli individuals, from violinists to teenage cricket stars; he favors boycotting Israeli film festivals, and boycotting stores that continue to carry Israeli goods. He has not bothered, however, to comment on the fact that Israeli-manufactured components are in many high-tech products, including the computers used at by BBC by the likes of Gary Lineker; his virtue-signaling, you see, has its limits, if it would in any way inconvenience him.
The BBC has become the U.K. version of CNN
It always was. Especially since the 6 Day War
If the Brits didn’t hate Jews they would have welcomed them to Palestine in the 1940s when they were charged with maintaining the land as the Jewish homeland instead of redirecting them toward Auschwitz. Nothing has changed much today.
Refusing to succour Jewish people who were being annihilated by Hitler was a simply terrible judgement call, and typical of the fatal UK diplomatic tendency to try so hard to be even-handed that it ends up discriminating in the opposite direction from the one it is trying to avoid. And, yes, it is possible that there were those in authority who were in sympathy with people like the Mufti and Mosley. However, it is unfair to perceive all British people as having been anti-Semitic – Britain was, after all, the destination of the Kinder-trains.
I am a British citizen, and my grandfather, who was too old to serve in the Forces during WWII, wept and couldn’t stop saying “The bastards, the bastards…” when he saw the Pathe footage of the liberation of the camps.
Stop using the kinder transport to whitewash the british government.
If it hadn’t been for Nicholas Winton, a throughly decent and moral man, those kids would have been left to die in the gas chambers.
Britain slammed its doors shut on the Jews when they most needed help. It ensured that the commonwealth did the same. It ensured that the media hid what hitler was doing to the Jews, so the british people wouldn’t demand they help them. It sent Jews trying to escape to ‘palestine’ back to europe, even though they knew what was going on. It cut quotas, in violation of its mandate, of Jews allowed into OUR homeland in order to appease the arabs, it refused to send planes to bomb the railway lines to the canps and it kept Jews penned up in DP camps after the war, some up to 1952.
And all through the mandate, it incited and enabled the arabs in rioting and killing Jews, because it wanted them gone. In 1948 britain helped arm those 5 arab armies, they trained them and some of their officers even fought with them.
I’m not talking about your average british soldier who fought in WII, I know how they felt when they found the camps and how much agony it caused them.
But don’t talk to me about the filth in the government.
I am not whitewashing anyone – the original writer said “Brits” without drawing a distinction between the British administration, and the British people generally. I am just pointing out that even if Britain was completely anti-Semitic in my grandfather’s generation (which it wasn’t – check out the Battle of Cable Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street), that does not mean that all British people of my generation need be. Though it does appear that we could have done a better job of educating the younger generation.
As a child, my grandmother’s next-door neighbours were Mr. and Mrs. Levene. He was a tailor, and, since I was a couple of years younger than their daughter, they passed on some beautifully made dresses and skirts to my mother for me and for my sister. Money was tight in our family, so this was much appreciated. Mrs. Levene was also an accomplished dancer, and some of her ball-gowns ended up in our dressing-up box – I particularly remember pirouetting in one with a skirt made from layer upon layer of blush pink tulle. I need scarcely enlarge on the likely implications of a name like “Levene”, though at the time I do not recall ever being told what it meant. In my teens, the one TV programme that had our entire family riveted was The Esther Rantzen Show. It took me 40 years to work out that she was Jewish – which scarcely suggests prejudice in my family, since this would certainly have resulted in some sort of snide remark or backhanded compliment.
We also had our own reasons for not being enthused about the Third Reich – my great grandfather was a Romany, so my family would have fared no better than Jewish people, had Hitler invaded.
Remember the voyage of the St.Louis and its passengers?
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/voyage-of-the-st-louis