No word yet from Gary Lineker on the Manchester synagogue attack. Not a dicky bird on Instagram, Facebook or whatever Twitter calls itself this week.
Which is unusual, to say the least. The Buoy Loynacre is a prolific poster on social media, especially on matters he knows absolutely nothing about.
Back in May he shared a link to a post from a pro-Palestinian group which featured a rat and was titled: ‘Zionism explained in two minutes.’ He’d previously promoted another link accusing Israel of genocide.
He subsequently apologised, but this deeply offensive anti-Semitic video undoubtedly hastened his departure from Match Of The Day. To be charitable, perhaps he’s learned his lesson.
By way of atonement, we might have expected an excoriating condemnation of the Heaton Park outrage on Lineker’s social media account. But he stayed resolutely stumm.
In so doing, he was at least consistent with the rest of the professional football establishment.
The FA, the Premier League in particular, normally jumps on every passing woke bandwagon from climate change to ‘trans’ rights. Players are still taking the knee to Black Lives Matter, five years after the death of George Floyd 4,000 miles away in Minnesota.
Rainbow laces, the murder of a child in Birmingham, No Room For Racism, Charlie Hebdo, floods in Libya, earthquakes in Morocco, war in Ukraine, the manager’s dog run over by a milk float – you name it, any excuse, they’ve got a minute’s silence.
Yet when it comes to anti-Semitism, nada.
I settled down in front of the game between Leeds United and my team, Tottenham Hotspur, on Saturday lunchtime, fully expecting some acknowledgement of the Yom Kippur atrocity in Manchester. Black armbands, a minute’s silence, something like that.
Especially as this week marks the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre, the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
After all, both Leeds and Spurs have sizeable support in their respective Jewish communities. There’s a famous story in Leeds about the club’s legendary manager Don Revie being told by a local rabbi that they shared the same congregation on a Saturday.
‘I get them in the morning, you get them in the afternoon.’
Yet there was no mark of respect from either set of players. The silence was deafening.
Only the two Manchester clubs, City and United, paid tribute to the dead of Heaton Park. But this wasn’t just a local tragedy, confined to that great city. This was a national scandal, the first time in modern history that British Jews had been murdered simply for being Jews.
Given their propensity for overt displays of virtue signalling, however insincere, one might have expected the bigwigs at the FA to order a minute’s silence at every football ground in the country.
After all, players are currently taking the knee again to mark Black History Month. Every time they repeat this fatuous gesture, TV commentators are contractually obliged to remind us that it is our sacred duty to ‘oppose racism in all its forms’.
Clearly, however, that doesn’t extend to murderous anti-Jewish racism.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. In the wake of October 7, the FA refused to light up the Wembley arch in the colours of the Israeli flag. That was despite the arch being lit regularly in support of every cause from the NHS to Pride Month.
Apparently, Jews don’t count in the hierarchy of victimhood.
Neither, it seems do ‘angry, middle-aged white men’, according to that other footballing philosopher, Gary Neville. He’s just put out a video monstering this particular demographic for hoisting Union and St George’s flags to protest against uncontrolled illegal immigration and the trashing of our national identity.
In one fell swoop, Neville has elevated himself alongside Lineker as ignorant idiot-in-chief. Both former football stars seem happy to abuse the very people who once idolised them – in Lineker’s case thousands of Jewish Spurs fans, in Neville’s the loyal middle-aged white men in the stands at Old Trafford.
They are, however, individuals. The FA is a national institution with collective responsibilities.
In the scheme of things, as regular readers will be aware, I normally abhor all performative displays of quasi-political virtue signalling at football grounds.
This time, though, it’s different. What took place in Manchester last week was a fundamental assault on our Jewish friends and neighbours, an affront to our national values and civil liberties.
On Thursday, England face Wales at Wembley. The FA should light up the arch in memory of those who died at Heaton Park and as a beacon of reassurance to the Jewish community. Both nations’ football associations should mandate a minute’s silence before kick-off.
Then we might just discover whether football is sincere in its mission to ‘kick out’ racism in all its forms, or whether – like Gary Lineker’s Twitter feed – that doesn’t include anti-Semitism.
