It’s a day ending in a ‘y’ which can only mean one thing – noted geopolitics expert Gary Lineker inflicting his opinions on the Middle East on the rest of us.
Gary’s latest dip into the Arab-Israeli conflict comes after the BBC was forced to pull its documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, from iPlayer while it performs a ‘due diligence’ check on the programme. This was prompted by the allegation that one of the programme’s child narrators was the son of a Hamas government minister. Since then, it has also been alleged that the programme mistranslated certain words used by its interviewees – changing the Arabic words for ‘Jew’ and ‘Jews’ to ‘Israel’ or ‘Israeli forces’.
All quite embarrassing for the Beeb, you might think, especially given the tremendously high horse it mounted at the beginning of the war when it refused to call Hamas a terrorist group, saying, ‘our business is to present our audiences with the facts.’
Yet for Lineker it appears the main problem is that the broadcaster has pulled the documentary at all. The handsomely paid presenter is one of 500 media figures to have signed a letter urging the BBC to reinstate the documentary, describing it as ‘an essential piece of journalism, offering an all-too-rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinians.’
For good measure, the letter suggests that critics of the documentary are themselves racist, as:
‘This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence – a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences.’
Those poor Hamas officials, constantly being linked to violence. It’s not like they belong to a government which only a year and a half ago launched a massacre which killed over a thousand Jews…
Still, all par for the course for a man who spent much of his adult life repeatedly headbutting a leather ball, you might think. As for the other signatories – such as Miriam Margolyes, Countryfile’s Anita Rani, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and nine BBC staff – what’s their excuse?
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