Performative antics

gone wholly unremarked by Ceferin, or indeed by Lineker.

Lineker and UEFA's Ceferin seem less interested in the truth, and more interested in polishing their modish antisemitic credentials. 

Sadly, it is only performative antics that cut through in his sphere. Take Lineker’s recent comment, addressing the sharing of an anti-Semitic rat emoji that hastened his exit from the BBC, that he was “anti-the killing of children”. It read as another appeal for secular sainthood, another reminder that he was on the side of the angels. “I come from a place of complete impartiality,” he declared. If only. Sadly, the problem with his pieties is that they have been filtered through a distinct ideological prism. He is the radicalised product of social networks, seeing fit to peddle the sophomoric propaganda of Owen Jones as if it were inscribed on tablets of stone. He is interested in truth only as far as it corresponds with his preconceived version of truth.

This is why the pressure on Uefa to give more specifics about Al-Obeid feels so opportunistic. For a start, we will perhaps never know the definitive version of his death: where the PFA has said he was killed by Israel while waiting at an aid distribution point, the Israel Defence Forces have denied this…

From the vantage point of Lineker et al, Uefa’s selective testimony on Al-Obeid is cast as a damning indictment of indifference to the Palestinians’ suffering. But you cannot be taken seriously as a paragon of virtue if your application of morality is so one-sided that you fail to address an Israeli footballer’s murder, or even the massacre of Jews that precipitated this entire conflagration. That is not altruism, it is activism.