Lineker’s criticism of Israel is ‘grotesque’, says Brendan O’Neill

Gary Lineker’s criticisms of Israel are “another level of double standard”, while the BBC’s coverage of the war against Hamas has been “dross” and “emotional manipulation”, Brendan O’Neill has said.

The prominent journalist, who is chief political writer for Spiked and a columnist for the Spectator, was speaking at an event organised by the JC at Mill Hill United Synagogue.

Lineker, a former footballer who now makes more than £1 million a year presenting Match of the Day for the BBC, is a man who compared a speech on asylum policy by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman to 1930s Germany but said “nothing” in the immediate aftermath of October 7.

“A thing that actually did look like something out of the 1930s, the bundling of Jews into the back of trucks, the kidnapping, rape and murder of Jewish women, the destruction of whole Jewish families and the decimation of whole Jewish towns – stuff genuinely reminiscent of the hysteria and pogroms of the 1930s – he didn’t say a word for days and days and days on end,” he told the JC’s Online Editor Josh Kaplan.

[Missing Credit]Journalist Brendan O'Neill speaks to an audience at a Jewish Chronicle event

O’Neill also had harsh words for Alastair Campbell, a host of the Rest is Politics podcast who rose to prominence in the 2000s at Tony Blair’s director of communications. In preparing a dossier to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which is now widely perceived to have misrepresented intelligence findings, Campbell helped to lead the UK “into a war which by every single metric is much worse than what’s happening in Gaza,” O’Neill said.

“On every measurement, what happened in Iraq is much, much, much worse than what is happening in Gaza, and, by the way, completely unjustifiable. Whereas of course Israel has every right to go after Hamas because it launched an attack on Israel on October 7.”

Last year, Lineker said about Gaza that he “couldn’t think of anything that I’ve seen worse in my lifetime”, and yet, O’Neill said, he’s “best mates” with Alastair Campbell. “He rubs shoulders, has chats, has beers with a man who played a part in something far worse than what’s happening in Gaza, and yet still thinks he can say Gaza is the worst thing he’s ever seen. It’s sick-making, it’s grotesque.”

O’Neill said the pair “pontificate about everything Israel does, without realising [in Lineker’s case] that the man literally sitting next to him in the pub while they’re tweeting about Israel did something worse. That goes beyond hypocrisy, it’s another level of double standard.”

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O’Neill also spoke about the BBC’s coverage of the war, his own impetuses for being such a vocal supporter of Israel, the left wing’s “suicidal alliance” with Hamas, and the recent resurgence of right-wing antisemitism and historical revisionism by prominent commentators in the US.

His most recent book, “After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the crisis of civilisation”, discusses how the West failed the “moral test of October 7” by not standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel in its war against terrorism.

O’Neill said the media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war is “unforgivably bad” and “the worst coverage of a war I’ve ever seen.”

The BBC especially has “a lot to answer for”, he said, responsible for “night after night giving millions of people the impression” that Israel is uniquely guilty and is conducting the “worst and most evil war ever”.

“What is pumped into peoples’ homes over the last 18 months is just dross,” he said, and in addition to being “factually incorrect” is often “emotional manipulation” lacking sufficient or any context.

“The message the BBC has sent, whether wittingly or otherwise, over the past 18 months is that there’s only one war happening in the world, it’s the worst war that has ever taken place, and it’s all down to this horrible nation called Israel.”

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He said it’s “so important” to push back against the “anti-Israel animus and to say it’s not a genocide, it’s not ethnic cleansing; it’s a heroic war that will benefit mankind.”

“What Israel has done over the past 18 months should be inspiring to the whole Western world, because it is a nation that is willing to defend itself, willing to protect its borders, willing to stand up for its history and its traditions, and it’s willing to defend its people from foreign elements on its border that would like to kill them” he said. “The West could take a lesson from that.”

The West, he said, has increasingly become a “mess” that “doesn’t really know what it believes in or what is worth fighting for.”

“Israel to me is incredibly inspiring, because it is actually standing up for the virtues and values that the West is failing to,” he said, and its mission to destroy Hamas is “a great and noble moral endeavour.

“And whatever tiny, small part I can play here in the UK making the case for Israel’s destruction of Hamas, I will do it gladly, because I think this is a battle not only between Israel and Hamas but between civilisation and barbarism.”

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