BBC Presenter Gary Lineker Posts Anti-Israel Video Featuring Rat Emoji – a Known Antisemitic Slur
BBC presenter Gary Lineker has been condemned after sharing an anti-Israel Instagram video which featured an emoji of a rat – a familiar antisemitic slur. The Mail has the story.
The Match Of The Day presenter and former England football captain posted a reel originating with the pro-Palestine group Palestine Lobby.
The cartoon image of a rat was seen on screen throughout, above the video in which Canadian-Palestinian lawyer Diana Buddu attacks Israel’s war in Gaza.
Lineker has been vocal in his own criticisms of Israel’s actions.
But campaigners say sharing this particular video with the rat image goes too far and have also criticised the BBC for whom Lineker will remain until after next year’s World Cup while stepping down as Match Of The Day host this month.
Disgusted users on X shared his post to on the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter.
It was immediately flagged as a post which “may violate X’s rules against Hateful Conduct”.
Images of rats and other vermin were regularly used as tropes by Nazi Germany to depict Jewish people, as many of Lineker’s critics today have pointed out.
The charity Campaign Against Antisemitism posted on X: “Nothing to see here. Just Gary Lineker’s Instagram account sharing an anti-Israel video misrepresenting Zionism, complete with a rat emoji.”
A CAA spokesperson has now told MailOnline: “Gary Lineker really has the worst luck when it comes to campaigning for his causes without aligning himself with extremists and antisemites.
“Not only does this video deliberately misrepresent Zionism – the belief that Jews have the same right to self-determination as everyone else – but it adds a rat emoji in doing so.
“Why is it that Gary Lineker keeps sharing content on social media that seems to cater to Jew-haters? Perhaps Mr Lineker is not as naïve as he would like us to believe.
“As the BBC’s highest-paid presenter and owner of a major media enterprise, maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“We will be submitting a complaint to the BBC over this latest post.
“However, we all know that, no matter how appalling Mr Lineker’s output, the BBC will perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to look the other way.
“When it comes to Jews, it seems that our national broadcaster believes that the usual standards simply don’t apply.”
A spokesperson for the Board of Deputies of British Jews said: “The BBC has allowed the situation with Gary Lineker to continue for far too long.
“He has caused great offence with this video – particularly with his egregious use of a rat emoji to illustrate Zionists.
“The BBC should ask him to leave now rather than allowing him to dictate his own terms.”
Worth reading in full.
Of course, at the Daily Sceptic we don’t approve of cancel culture, no matter whom it’s directed at, irritating right-on presenters like Gary Lineker included. Still, I think we can all agree that the world would be a happier place if Jews weren’t implicitly likened to vermin in posts shared by highly-paid BBC presenters, who should probably refrain from posting Nazi-esque tropes from anti-Israel hate groups on social media.
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Words can’t express what contempt I hold this excuse for a man in
“Still, I think we can all agree that the world would be a happier place if Jews weren’t implicitly likened to vermin.”
Agreed.
And wouldn’t the world have been a better place if the common vernacular for Palestinians in Israel from the last 36 years in my experience was not exactly that word. “Vermin”.
Projection much? Appearing to “agree” as cover for a sly dig revealing your true thoughts?
On numerous of my past visits – 1970 – 1990s to Israel on business I never once heard Palestinians referred to as vermin, nor have I read or heard Israelis in the media use that word.
Your experience? I doubt that.
This word ‘projection’ doesn’t mean much. What does it indicate ? It is now fashionable in the way that ‘narcissist’ entered the vernacular (that word again) a few years ago and has been abused since. So I don’t know what you mean. Your saying I ‘appear’ to agree most definitely is sly whereas my ‘dig’ I wanted to be visceral and fatal pointing as it does to the poison at base in Israeli life and society. Ask Gideon Levy. He states far worse than I and he has spent his life there. But I do appreciate and actually am relieved that you did not hear that word. But can you be sure that good manners were their first concern as they would inevitably prefer not to open up to that extent. There were deals to be done. Obviously i was not there. And you are right to question my experience. It is sorely lacking but too poignant. An English acquaintance married a Jewish Israeli woman and was emigrating to join her. I politely asked if the Palestinian issue provided much pressure on the quality of life there as an Israeli chum had found it had and so jumped ship to… Read more »
Perhaps we should compare the amount of bombs dropped and the amount of lives lost, to perhaps, cast a closer eye on which party is inherently the worse. Perhaps we should consider how we might feel if our family only had access to 245 calories a day per person
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/people-northern-gaza-forced-survive-245-calories-day-less-can-beans-oxfam
The ‘anti-Semitic’ trope is rolled out any time one questions the actions of a those who rail against Zionism. People are people, regardless of race, religion, colour or creed, but it seems we are blind to the atrocities of ‘our side’.
Yes the standards always change and the goalposts always move depending on who’s hating/whinging/virtue-signalling, but we’ve seen how these Muslims and their useful idiots behave here in the West, with a blatant ”Rules for thee but not for me” hypocritical outlook. They’re not renowned for their tolerance, after all. Were the masses of Jews that were ethnically cleansed from their homelands ever a threat to the Arabs? ”Any time you bring up how Jews were ethnically cleansed from nearly every Arab country in the last 70–80 years—after living there for centuries, long before Muhammad was even a thing—you get the same smug response: “Well yeah, Israel was created. What did you expect?” Okay, so you’re saying that major events can justify mass expulsions? That cause and effect makes sense to you? Interesting logic. So let me ask: if Israel’s creation justifies kicking nearly a million Jews out of their homes, then what exactly doesn’t justify population shifts? Because the moment anyone even suggests relocating people from Gaza—voluntarily, after the worst terror massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—it suddenly becomes “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “war crimes.” What happened? Didn’t you just lay out the rules? Big events lead to displacement. Actions have… Read more »
How lovely. If you support Hamas you support ISIS, and all the rest of them, as far as I’m concerned. All are Jihadist terrorist, anti-West scum, cut from the exact same cloth and need eradicated from the face of the earth. You either condemn terrorism or you condone it. There’s no in between;
”Hundreds of people who fought for the Islamic State terrorist group and have now returned to the UK are not being successfully prosecuted.
A committee of MPs and peers warned that more than 400 fighters for IS, also known as Daesh, are believed have returned to Britain after joining the banned organisation in the Middle East.
IS, which once held large swathes of land in Syria and Iraq, was responsible for widespread campaigns of terrorism, murder and rape, often targeted against minority religious groups such as the Yazidis.
Estimates suggest that 5,000 Yazidis were killed and more than 200,000 displaced from their homes by the terrorist group.
Parliament’s joint committee on human rights (JCHR) said that none of the 400-plus IS supporters who had returned to the UK had been prosecuted for their crimes.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/13/hundreds-islamic-state-fighters-in-uk-not-being-prosecuted/
And Al-Qaeda, from which ISIS was an off-shoot? Al Jolani, the new, Western-backed President of Syria and leader of Al-Qaeda, murderer of US citizens for which there was a $10 million bounty from the US State Department on his head, is now due to meet with Donald Trump. The West is indeed full of hypocrisy.
According the Vanessa Beasley ISIS is run by the British secret service and I’m pretty certain she also said the CIA are up to their necks in all sorts of shenanigans in that part of the world. I don’t think we know half of what really goes on over there. Just my honest opinion. Have a super day.
“Jews were ethnically cleansed from nearly every Arab country in the last 70–80 years—after living there for centuries …”
Really? I had no idea. Which countries?
The problem today is that Israelis are massacring Palestinians and two wrongs never make a right.
Quoting Caitlin Johnstone,
“Everything we’ve been seeing in Gaza and the West Bank has been the result of an agenda to remove all Palestinians from Palestine via death or displacement. Everything. It was never about fighting terrorism. It’s not about rescuing the Palestinians from a ruined enclave. It’s never been about self-defense. It’s never been about hostages. It has always been about ending the existence of Palestinians in Palestine so that their territories can be fully owned by Jewish Israelis.
“This has been true of all of Israel’s abusive actions since October 2023, and it was true of all of Israel’s abusive actions before October 2023. This is what the Palestinians are resisting, and it’s why October 7 happened in the first place. We’re watching an indigenous population struggle against an agenda — an agenda which is backed by an entire globe-spanning empire — to end their existence as a people in their native homeland.”
Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Yemen, Turkey, Egypt and also Iran (not an Arab Country).
Will that do to be going on with?
Don’t befuddle his little mind with facts.
To give just one example of expulsion, Iraq. In the 1940s the Jewish population of Baghdad was 100,000, a third of the population and the largest community. Now there are no Jews and hardly any Christians either.
Contrast with Israel where 20% of the population are Arabs, and the Christian and Druze especially among them are likely to feel a lot safer there; so the Druze villages in Syria bordering Israel are it is reported wanting to come under Israeli protection/
.
Was it not the Druze being massacred in Syria recently by Al Jolani and his mercenaries? With Israel bombing large areas of Syria? Al Jolani, of course, being praised by European and US leaders. And nobody cares about all the suffering the West has caused and is causing to the Syrians there.
”Between 1920 and 1970, 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries: from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Yemen, including places where they had lived for twenty centuries.
How does one explain this exodus? It is the blind spot of contemporary political consciousness and an object of denial. There is not even an expression to name this major event. “The Forgotten Exodus” is the most commonly used term. But it actually masks the nature and impact of this historical event.
All the countries that expelled Jews have one thing in common: they belong to Islam (including Turkey and Iran, which are not Arab countries).”
https://jcpa.org/article/the-expulsion-of-the-jews-from-muslim-countries-1920-1970-a-history-of-ongoing-cruelty-and-discrimination/
Any discrimination on the basis of religion is unacceptable, assuming that religion is not calling for the end of the world or whatever. But what does your referenced article have to do with the current genocide taking place in Gaza?
The article claims 900,000 Jews were displaced from various countries between 1920 and 1950, to which I confess (assuming it is true) I was unaware. It appears most of those offences occurred after 1948 which may have been in retaliation to the Nakba of that year when 750,000 Palestinians were displaced.
But are you claiming that those past offences, committed by various countries, justifies Israel’s elimination of completely innocent men, women and children in Gaza today?
There is no justification for genocide, period!
And if Israeli Jews want to live in peace with their neighbours then I suggest, certainly as a start, they stop bombing them! And then they have one hell of a way to go to reconcile their religion with the religion of those around them.
Sorry, I support Christopher Hitchens’ view that religions poison everything, or words to that effect. What is happening in the Middle East seems to confirm that viewpoint.
nonsense.
Understatement.
You said, “We’re watching an indigenous population struggle against an agenda — an agenda which is backed by an entire globe-spanning empire — to end their existence as a people in their native homeland.”
That would be the ENGLISH.
I agree completely. Then you must understand how Palestinians feel being displaced from their land.
I understand how the Palestinian CHRISTIANS feel being displaced from THEIR LAND, and persecuted for 1400 years by both Palestinian MUSLIMS & JEWS.
All the land claimed by Kurdish Muslims was once CHRISTIAN LAND.
And before Christians? I do not care if someone is a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, Protestant, Catholic or whatever. They are all humans and should behave in a humane manner. To claim that people from one religion have special rights or a special claim to a part of the globe is not credible.
I was born in Eastern Europe.
My mum (born in 1939) can still remember when the Jews living in her home town were rounded up and put on trains. (Her dad worked for the railway company and so she lived in a house right next to the station.)
All that was left of the local Jewish population was a Jewish cemetery, derelict by the time I was a teenager.
As a young boy I used to climb over the cemetery wall and roam around the wilderness that the cemetery had turned to. Nobody left to visit the graves.
“I think we can all agree that the world would be a happier place if Jews weren’t implicitly likened to vermin in posts shared by highly-paid BBC presenters”
I’m not sure I quite agree with this. The world would probably be a happier place if nobody THOUGHT OF any other human being as being “like vermin”. But as some apparently do (though I doubt Lineker does – he’s just virtue signalling IMO) surely it’s better we know what people think?
I don’t see what his being highly paid and working for the BBC has to do with it. I want the BBC to be sold to private investors so that I don’t have to pay for it any more, but he’s as entitled to his views as anyone else, idiotic as many of them seem to me.
I’m not sure of my position. My initial reaction is this, but is not cast in stone. As a private individual he is free to hold and express his opinions, however offensive they may be, in the spirit of the FSU. As a public-facing employee [?] of the national broadcaster he has some obligation or (at least be cautious) to keep his private views to himself, lest he damage the “brand image” of that broadcaster. Isn’t the situation akin to some celebrity “brand ambassador” suddenly being revealed as a {insert toxic, embarrassing slur to taste}”?
Well “brand ambassadors” are also “private individuals”. You may work for a firm that feels that you are a “brand ambassador”. My contract of employment includes all sorts of clauses about social media posts which is why I post anonymously.
The BBC should be private and then it would be the business of the management, and not mine – though I still feel that employers should not be allowed to fire people for expressing views the employer does not like – such as anti-woke, anti-lockdown, anti-immigration views.
As a British mouthpiece and that is what Lineker has become I consider his use of his position on the principal broadcasting channel of this country to mouth-off in such an egregious way to be insulting to the ordinary, good and decent people who pay this Next Tuesday’s wages.
He should be sacked immediately the rubbish that he is.
What word would you prefer for people who, for example, put live babies in an oven and switch it on, people who take a cheese-wire to cut off the faces of those in rival sects, people who stone others to death, people who serially rape little children (and those who know, but do nothing), those who butcher people in tueur homes – for example.
I am not referring to events in Israel.
If you’re talking about individuals rather than whole races or cultures then you have a point, though I still think comparing humans to vermin is perhaps not helpful. But anyway my point was more that if that’s what people really think, I want to know about it.
I never heard of a rat being linked to Jews, but plenty of epithets are hurled at many other members of other religions, ethnic and political groups throughout the world without people being arrested and thrown into prison for it. Don’t the Scots refer to the English as “swine-eaters”? And Muslim men call western women “Meat”. Some people call the police “Pigs”. Ethnic Africans & Leftists call white people “Gammon”. The Jews call the Goyim “Cattle”. The Chinese call westerners “Big Nose”. Then there’s the old joke about Poles, or Irish, or Fill-in-the-blank, that it takes three of them to change a light bulb: one to hold the bulb, and two to turn the ladder.
Rats are quite intelligent and interesting creatures in the wild, and one of the 12 respected members of the Chinese Zodiac.
Freedom of Speech & Thought is the very foundation of democracy, and one of the greatest defenders of that is Lord Toby Young, the Jewish founder of the Free Speech Union, now with branches in many other countries around the world—an achievement of which to be immensely proud.
“I never heard of a rat being linked to Jews…”
Other way round!
Never heard of Nationalist Socialist Germany 1933 to 1945 and its propaganda towards the Jews and the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” decided at the Wansee Convention 1942?
I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Auschwitz either?
https://youtu.be/0jl2w3xYFHQ?si=a04-d12GoX-BK8CU
Silly comment.
I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the Ukrainian Holodomor either?
Defund Gary Lineker
I can’t say how disappointed I am by that. Is the Nazi insinuation really necessary? I don’t care if the Nazi’s used that symbol and he retweeted it (together with a whole bunch of other stuff) The Nazis did lots of things, said lots of things, used lots of symbols.
The only question in my mind is whether comparing Lineker’s views regarding Jews to those of the Nazi’s is a fair representation of his views. If it is fine. But if not, why do the indirect Nazi thing?
Because…
Rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, vultures – these are just some of the animals the Nazis used to deride and dehumanize Jews. They used words too. In a new linguistic analysis of dozens of Nazi speeches, articles, pamphlets and posters, researchers show how this process of anti-Semetic dehumanization, which began before the Nazis took power and helped fuel the party’s popularity, was modulated to justify atrocity:
I understand that.
We all just have to make our best effort to make sure we make a clear distinction between people who want to exterminate all jews and people who are critical of Israel’s policy, even those who do it in a clumsy manner.
If every time someone makes a legitimate criticism of Israel or a jewish person they are accused of being Nazis, or worse still, they are accused of antisemitism despite not having said anything at all against Israel or Jewish people, like for example Andrew Bridgen, then we are not only not helping, we’re probably making it worse.
At the end of the day no one really likes it when some people receive special protection nor when a group of people present themselves as a special group of victims, be it Jewish people, trans, black people, muslims, women, gay people. We may put up with it because we’re shamed and browbeaten into it, but eventually it generates resentment.
No one likes to be beaten over the head with someone else’s victimhood.
”At the end of the day no one really likes it when some people receive special protection nor when a group of people present themselves as a special group of victims,..” Well it certainly ”generates resentment” with you, doesn’t it? Because you seem to have quite the issue with acknowledging that some people from the groups you listed are legitimately being victimized, their personal safety and rights being overlooked and abused, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with being ”beaten over the head with someone else’s victimhood.” Unless you think a visibly Jewish person who’s walking down the street and attacked, or female nurses that are no longer entitled to get changed in a single-sex changing room away from men, or a young woman who’s injured by a male that was allowed to play in the female category, so badly that her sports career is now over, all “present themselves as a special group of victims” as opposed to having justifiable grounds for their grievances? I know this will come as a shock to you, so you might want to sit down for a sec, but there’s people in society other than white, straight men who are genuinely being… Read more »
I don’t deny there are people that are victims of others’ aggression. That’s obvious.
But I prefer to view people as individuals rather than members of a group. Because there are of course Jewish people that are victims of all sorts.of things. But there are many that aren’t. And there are Jewish people that are predators and aggressors. That goes for pretty much any category of people you want to create.
I just don’t think the categorisation helps. I would rather call out the behaviour and the individual(s) and not paint everyone with the same brush because doing so is wrong and it creates unnecessary resentment.
(BTW, does every one of your responses to me have to automatically include a hint of nastiness and personal resentment? Is it really so hard to be civil?)
“Nastiness”? Ooh, feeling victimised are we, Mr Touchy-Pants? 🤭 The usual over-sensitive response I’ve come to expect with the fragile-egoed, such as yourself. Which part of my post did you not find civil?🧐 You’re not used to plainspeaking women that disagree with/challenge you in real life, are you?
As a ‘free speech absolutist’ I should hardly have to remind you that “offence is taken, never given”.
You are respecting my right to exercise free speech now, aren’t you…?😏
I think as far as Jews are concerned I suspect Lineker’s views are probably fairly closely aligned with you know who, however I agree with you that it is un-necessary and counter productive to mention it. Particularly in the absence of evidence.
His views are quite vile enough on their own terms without resorting to juvenile slurs.
Visit to his house by the plod to correct his thinking?
No, thought not.
Good point. No Brexity stuff there either.
Lineker! Yooo dirdy rat.
Ah, sooner or later for some reason all these lovely people, holding all the “correct” opinions, “be kind”, “love not hate”, just start an irresistible urge to embrace antisemitism.
And Anti-Christianism.
Sorry but that is nonsense. And that is why people, also on this website, are tired of being derided as anti-Semitic. (Strange there is no equivalent word for anti-Christian or anti-Moslem.)
There are plenty of Jews who are disgusted with the actions of the Israeli government. Are they supposed to be anti-Semites? Hardly.
Was this the same Mr Linekar who compared the last government’s asylum
policies with 1930’s Germany? Pot/kettle
Ticking off the MOTDs until the disgusting runt is gone.
Remember that torture in 1984? Just saying…
I don’t think calling out anti-semitism (or any kind of racism) can be called ‘cancel culture’! Morals and standards have been inverted for so long that nobody knows which way is up any more. He should be sacked from the BBC.