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.’

This is the man who once said that Suella Braverman, the then home secretary, had given off Nazi vibes in a speech about tightening Britain’s border controls. Her language was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ’30s’, he said. And yet here he is, two years later, reposting a Zionist rodent. Here’s the thing – that use of a twitching, sneaky rat in a stinging clip about the world’s only Jewish state is far more ‘similar’ to the inhuman bigotries of 1930s Germany than anything Ms Braverman said, and yet Lineker shared it rather than condemning it.

Lineker is part of a caste of turbo-smug ‘liberal’ influencers who see fascism everywhere except where it actually exists. Tory speeches on immigration? Nazi-like. A rat-illustrated rant about the Jewish homeland? No biggie. The votes for Brexit and Trump? The new 1930s. The invasion of the Jewish State by a 6,000-strong army of anti-Semites with the express intention of killing as many Jews as possible? Whatever. Back in 2023, Lineker infamously did not comment on Hamas’s 7 October pogrom for days, which was unusual for a man who worries about things that are ‘similar to Germany in the ’30s’.

Lineker’s plea that he wouldn’t have made the connection even if he’d clocked the Zio-rat sums up the cultural establishment’s blindspot on Jew hatred. We live under a regime of influencers who are hyper-sensitive about racism. Who see racism in everything. And yet when Jew hatred surges, they seem not to notice. Or they look the other way. We now have ‘Jew rats’ again, and people on the streets chanting for the Army of Muhammad to come back and finish off the Jews, and huge spikes in anti-Semitic violence. And yet the self-styled anti-racists who spent the past five years blubbing over the ‘fascism’ of Brexit and Trumpism have been schtum.

Witness the silence from Britain’s supposed progressives on Lineker’s reposting of that rat. If a well-known public figure had shared a social-media post likening black folk to monkeys, these people would have gone nuts, for days. But it was just Jews, just that old ‘Jew rat’ propaganda, so as you were, nothing to see here. Their silence says so much more than they will ever know.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy