Watch: Gary Lineker appears to call Oct 7 attacks ‘the Hamas thing’
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Gary Lineker has been accused of “tone-deaf” comments after he appeared to refer to the Oct 7 attacks as “the Hamas thing”.
The Match of the Day presenter made the remarks on the British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hasan’s Mehdi Unfiltered programme.
Speaking about the war in Gaza, he said: “I can’t think of anything that I’ve seen worse in my lifetime. The constant images of children losing their lives day in, day out.
“Now obviously we all know Oct 7 happened, and the Hamas thing, but the minute you raise your voice against what they’re now doing there, you get accused of being a supporter of Hamas.”
More than 1,100 people died in the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct 7, and more than 250 were taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Air and artillery strikes carried out by the Israeli military in response have killed more than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry says.
He has ‘barely commented’ on atrocity
The comments by Lineker, 63, were criticised as minimising the Oct 7 atrocities.
A spokesman for the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) said: “Gary Lineker is not a lone heroic voice: he is one of a mob offering up one-sided, tone-deaf interventions on social media.
“It has not escaped anyone’s notice that, despite his clear interest in the topic and social media habit, he has barely commented on the worst anti-Semitic atrocity since the Holocaust on Oct 7 – ‘the Hamas thing’, as he has now reluctantly referred to it in passing.”
A representative for Lineker refused to comment when approached by The Telegraph.
Lineker plays the old trick of claiming to have a "neutral perspective" before letting rip with the Hamas propaganda pic.twitter.com/xOhzsctYYl
— Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) May 12, 2024
The CAA has also claimed that the presenter breached BBC impartiality guidelines. The podcast on which he made the comments is not affiliated with the BBC, and is produced by Mr Lineker’s own company, Goalhanger Podcasts.
“Far from being silenced, Mr Lineker’s stance has become so normalised – and the voice of the mob of which he is a part has grown so loud – that the BBC is desensitised to it and regularly ignores the clear breaches of its impartiality guidelines that these interventions represent,” the CAA spokesman said.
The BBC has been approached for comment.
It is not the first time that Lineker has been embroiled in an impartiality row.
Presenter has criticised Government policy
He was criticised by Conservative MPs after calling a Government policy “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s” in March 2023.
He has also backed a campaign calling for the scrapping of the Government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
In January, Jewish BBC staff lodged formal complaints about Lineker’s social media use after he shared, then deleted, a message calling for Israel to be banned from international football tournaments.
It is understood Lineker believed he was sharing news of such a ban, rather than a call for one, and deleted the post.
A few months before, Lineker had also shared a video of a discussion between the journalist Owen Jones and Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University, in which the academic argued that Israel was engaged in “genocidal killing”.
In the podcast, the presenter described the situation in Gaza as “ the worst thing I’ve seen in my lifetime”.
“I’m not Muslim. I’m not Jewish. I’m not Israeli. I’m not Palestinian. So see, I think, purely from the outside as a neutral perspective,” he said.
“There’s a lot of heavy lobbying on people to be quiet so I understand why most people refrain, but I’m getting on a bit now. I’m fairly secure, and I can’t be silent about what’s happening. It’s so utterly awful.”
