Gary Lineker is making an utter fool of himself over Israel

As is now clearer than ever, Gary Lineker should never have taken to tweeting his opinions about current affairs. But this isn’t just because he works for the supposedly impartial BBC. 

It’s also because, once you start tweeting your opinions about current affairs, you really can’t afford to stop, or even to pause. You need to tweet your opinions about all major events. Otherwise, there’s a risk that your silence on certain events will be interpreted as hypocrisy. Or worse.

Take the events of October 7, the day the terrorist group Hamas perpetrated the single greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. In the immediate aftermath, Mr Lineker didn’t tweet about it. And as his followers had grown so used to him tweeting about current affairs, some of them wondered why not. 

Back in March, Mr Lineker had tweeted that the Government’s language on immigration reminded him of “Germany in the 1930s”. So how about this massacre of Jews? Didn’t that remind him of “Germany in the 1930s”, too? 

Unfortunately, they had no way of knowing. Because, on October 7, Mr Lineker posted only two tweets. One was an innocent plug for a history podcast about empires. And the other said: “Super Spurs are top of the league.”

As a result, he suddenly found himself in a peculiar position. In the past, when he’d commented on current affairs, people had angrily asked why he couldn’t just stick to football. But now that he hadn’t commented on current affairs, people were angrily asking why he was just sticking to football.

Personally, I preferred to take a more charitable view. Perhaps, I thought, his apparent silence meant that he’d wisely resolved to stop tweeting about controversial issues. In which case, good for him. A sensible decision.

It seems, however, that I was wrong. On Tuesday, Mr Lineker tweeted his endorsement of a video made by the Left-wing columnist Owen Jones, a furious critic of Israel. And in that video, an academic called Raz Segal accused Israel of committing “textbook genocide”. 

This is, it’s fair to say, a highly debatable view. In my opinion, the only people who wish to commit genocide in this conflict are Hamas. Its official charter explicitly commits it to the slaughter of Jews and the obliteration of Israel. It just hasn’t yet succeeded in doing so, or, at least, not in full. Israel, by contrast, possesses the firepower to kill everyone in Gaza, if it wanted to. Yet it never has. Its aim is to fight back against Hamas. 

So, as I’ve argued before, the truth about genocide is as follows. Hamas would do it, but couldn’t. Israel could do it, but wouldn’t.

Yet Mr Lineker hailed the video as “worth 13 minutes of anyone’s time”. And, because of this, his critics are understandably wondering what made him so keen on it. 

What a pity the BBC recently told him, and other star names, that they’re “free to express opinions” on social media. It really should have banned them. If only to stop the star names making such fools of themselves.