https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/14/why-do-so-many-liberals-have-a-blindspot-on-jew-hatred/
I thought Gary Lineker was a dab hand at spotting things that are reminiscent of the Nazi era? Perhaps someone can explain, then, why he shared an ‘anti-Zionist’ Instagram post that was illustrated with the rat emoji. The Jew as rodent, as vermin-like pest, as the lowest and most diseased of Earth’s beasts – it doesn’t get more Nazi era than that, Gary.
Lineker is in hot water after reposting an Instagram story from the anti-Israel campaign group, Palestine Lobby. It was a post featuring a video clip titled ‘Zionism explained in two minutes’. It was the usual Zio-bashing fare that faux-liberal midwits like Lineker mistake for daring commentary. Only it was worse this time, because the post came with a cartoon rodent, twitching its filthy tale.
You don’t need a PhD in the crimes of 20th-century Europe to feel alarmed – and sickened – by such an image. The vile likening of Jews with rats was all the rage in Nazi Germany. Goebbels pumped out propaganda depicting Jews as a rodent race that ‘carry contagion, flood the continent and devour precious resources’. Der Stürmer published cartoons of Jew-rats being exterminated. ‘When the vermin are dead’, one caption said, ‘the German oak will flourish once more’.
Such gross images were central to the Nazi project of dehumanising Jews. For if Jews were rats, then their incineration in the death camps was not a crime – it was ‘pest control’. To see the ‘Jew rat’ make a comeback in 2025 is chilling in the extreme. And I swear, anyone who says the Palestine Lobby post did not liken all Jews to rats, only Zionists, is going to get slapped. You couldn’t ask for better proof that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism in a keffiyeh than the fact that some of its adherents are now even rehabilitating the rat propaganda of that darkest moment in human history.
And then Lineker comes along and shares it. What was he thinking? He says he wasn’t thinking. His agent says he ‘did not notice [the] rodent emoticon’. And if he had noticed it, ‘he would not have made any connection’, the agent says, which I guess means Lineker is unaware of the history of depicting Jews as rodents. He’s deleted it now, his agent tells us. Is it just me or is that an incredibly perfunctory statement? If I had unwittingly shared an image that echoed Nazi propaganda, I’d be a hell of a lot more contrite. I’d at least say sorry. Not our Gary, though. Maybe he thinks it’s no big deal that he reposted a Zio-rat to his 1.2million IG followers.
That Lineker ‘would not have made any connection’ even if he’d noticed the rodent emoticon doesn’t make his repost any better. In some ways it makes it worse. Why doesn’t he know that Jews were compared to rats? If someone on IG had posted a clip slamming Nigerians as the world’s most toxic people alongside an image of an ape, he’d know very well what they were playing at. His ignorance of the long, grim history of caricaturing Jews as vermin is inexcusable, especially given that he’s been wanging on about the Jewish State for 18 months solid. To use a slogan beloved of his class of imperious Remoaner tossers: ‘Educate yourself.’
