[Crimson Dynamo]

Gary Lineker, the BBC’s chief political commentator, believes it’s unfair that
he receives so much criticism for his comments on Israel and Gaza. “The
minute you raise your voice against what they’re now doing there,” he
complained during an interview with the Left-wing journalist Mehdi Hasan,
“you get accused of being a supporter of
Hamas.”

Any such accusation is clearly outrageous. I’m quite sure St Gary doesn’t
support Hamas, or indeed any other genocidal Islamist terror group.

I do, however, think he suffers from the same problem as an awful lot of
Western progressives. Which is that, when it comes to Israel, he has
absolutely no idea how biased he sounds.

As a matter of fact, he demonstrated this during the very same interview.
Speaking about the war in Gaza, St Gary said: “I can’t think of anything that
I’ve seen worse in my lifetime.”

This is a remarkable statement. Not least because St Gary was born all the
way back in November 1960. And, during the 63 and a half years since, the
world has endured quite a large number of brutal conflicts. Take the Second
Congo War (1998-2003), which
claimed an estimated 5.4m lives. And the Vietnam War (1955-75), which
claimed an estimated 3.5m. And the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-89), which
claimed an estimated 2m. To name but a few.

Indeed, far from being the bloodiest conflict since 1960, the war in Gaza isn’t
even the bloodiest being fought right now. The Syrian civil war, which began
in 2011, has so far killed more than 600,000 people. Then there’s the small matter of Russia’s war in
Ukraine. And, as mentioned in Saturday’s Way of the World, the ongoing
conflict in Sudan. To give just one small glimpse of the horror: a 17-year-old
Sudanese boy told Human Rights Watch that he’d witnessed paramilitaries
shooting children and then flinging
their corpses into a river.

St Gary, however, says he can’t think of anything that he’s seen worse in his
lifetime than what Israel is currently doing in Gaza, in its efforts to destroy
Hamas. I’ve no doubt that he’s being entirely sincere. I merely wonder how
he came to such a conclusion,
given that so many other conflicts in his lifetime have been even more
horrifying, and killed vastly more people.

Perhaps, during his glorious playing days, St Gary was so relentlessly focused
on his football that he never watched the news or opened a newspaper – and
therefore simply didn’t hear about these other conflicts. I suppose that’s one
possibility.

Even so, it is curious that Western progressives in general always seem so
very much louder in their condemnation of Israel than in their condemnation
of other warring nations. What exactly is it about Israel that makes them
constantly single it out like this?

I fear we may never know.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...his-worst-yet/