Gary Lineker has done a new interview with the BBC’s Amol Rajan to mark his departure from Match of the Day. This follows tensions regarding his refusal to censor himself politically, especially on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Most mainstream media headlines about the interview, however, seemed to ignore his powerful critique of the BBC over its awful coverage of Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
Gary Lineker: ‘You can’t be impartial about the mass murder of thousands of children’
Former football star Gary Lineker insisted that one key mistake the BBC makes is that it “tries to appease the people that hate the BBC“. And this is particularly clear when it comes to the Israel lobby. Because genocide apologists hate it when truth comes out, and even highly compromised news outlets like the BBC can’t help telling the truth sometimes.
In February, for example, pro-Israel forces bullied the BBC into pulling an important documentary about Israel’s crimes in Gaza, and Lineker was one of over a thousand UK-based media professionals to condemn the public broadcaster’s “politically motivated censorship”, which they described as “racist” and “dehumanising”. This letter accused the BBC of “erasing Palestinian suffering” and “suppressing narratives that humanise Palestinians”.
And in his BBC interview this week, Gary Lineker also hit back hard against accusations that he should have kept his mouth shut on the Gaza genocide to protect the BBC‘s ‘impartiality’, stressing that:
the mass murder of thousands of children is probably something that we should have a little opinion on
On average, Israeli occupation forces have killed at least one Palestinian child every hour in Gaza since their genocide began in October 2023. In total, they have murdered around 17,492 children. That number includes about 825 babies, 895 one-year-olds, 3,266 preschoolers, and 4,032 six-to-10-year-olds.
Amol Rajan responded to Lineker by saying the BBC “needs to be impartial about it”. Lineker cut him off, saying:
Why? It needs to be factual.
‘The FULL context needs to be there’
Rajan echoed Israel’s attempt to justify its genocidal crimes in Gaza as a response to the events of 7 October 2023, ignorantly saying “that full context needs to be there”. But Gary Lineker’s comeback was clear. He asserted:
But that’s not the full context, is it? Because the full context starts way before October the 7th, doesn’t it?
That context includes the growth of political Zionism in the late 19th century, British colonialism in Palestine in the early 20th century, the Zionist settler movement and its terror campaigns before Israel’s creation in 1948, the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, Israel’s decades-long consolidation of control via war and oppression, and Western support for Israel as a Cold War anti-communist power and then as an ongoing outpost, proxy, and tool for imperialism in the Middle East via ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and war crimes.
While the BBC keeps platforming Israeli propaganda for ‘impartiality’ purposes, it rarely gives the full context which would show true journalistic professionalism.
Gary Lineker, "What's going on there (Gaza), the mass murder of thousands of children is something we should have an opinion on"
Amol Rajan, "The BBC needs to be impartial about it"
Gary Linekar, "Why? It needs to be factual"
Amol Rajan, "It needs to be impartial about… pic.twitter.com/LFUuvpvyCe
— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) April 22, 2025
Other mainstream media outlets hardly jumped on Lineker’s Gaza genocide comments either:
That’s why it’s up to independent media outlets and rare mainstream critics like Gary Lineker to keep highlighting what the establishment media won’t.
Featured image via screengrab
