Brendan O’Neill

What happened to Gary Lineker? For years he was football’s Mr Nice Guy. To some he was the Steve Davis of footie: a tad dull but a good egg. Now he’s been let go by the BBC after sharing an Instagram post that seemed to compare Jews to rats. That’s one hell of a tumble. I have seen many good men lost to the religion of centrism My view? He was radicalised online. We often hear about kids being led astray by digital fruitcakes like Andrew Tate. Now we need to talk about the full-grown adults whose minds are turned to mush by drivel on the internet. In Lineker’s case it wasn’t the Tate-like promise of fast cars and sexy women that drove him crazy – it was the fame and glory he won from an even freakier online subculture: toxic centrism.

When a US citizen, just 19, was taken captive by a fascist militia, what did America’s progressives do? They cosplayed as his captors. They wrapped their faces in the keffiyeh in gleeful mimicry of the militants who seized their compatriot. They cheered the jailers of their fellow citizen. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, some cried, ‘martyrs’ meaning the radical Islamists who had dragged their teenage countryman into a hellish lair and kept him there for 583 days. Beyond these Hamas-loving agitators, even milder ‘progressive’ voices will have helped to make Alexander’s life in captivity harder The release of Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage in Gaza, is cause for celebration. He was born in Tel Aviv and raised in New Jersey.

This week Lucy Powell, leader of the House of Commons, did something unusual for a politician: she spoke from the heart. Her dismissal of the rape gangs as a ‘dog whistle’ was no gaffe. It was not a ‘blunder’. It was a brutally honest expression of the government’s exasperation with this pesky scandal. It was savagely candid, pulling back the curtain on Labour’s gross and haughty indifference to this outrage in which thousands of working-class girls suffered the most unspeakable abuse. Powell has essentially scoffed at thousands of working-class women by calling the scandal that ravaged their girlhoods a ‘little trumpet’ It was on Any Questions that Powell gave voice to her party’s elitist vexation with all the public blather about rape gangs.

I look forward to Keir Starmer hosting a special summit on the Channel 4 documentary, Groomed. And to hearing him gush about it every time a reporter puts a mic anywhere near his mouth. And to seeing his proposals for showing it to teens in schools across the land in order that we might prise open their innocent eyes to the dangers of so-called grooming gangs. These girls were sacrificed at the altar of preserving the ideology of multiculturalism After all, he did all that for Adolescence, a Netflix drama about a made-up crime against a fictional working-class girl. So surely he’ll do it for a documentary that lays out in grim, eye-watering detail the industrial-scale horrors that were inflicted on real working-class girls by gangs of mostly Muslim men in towns across England.

If someone pulled on a Ku Klux Klan hood and went up on a stage and shouted ‘Up the KKK!’, what would you think of that person? Call me a literalist but I’d think that person supports the KKK. I would interpret his donning of the pointy hood and his singing of the KKK’s praises as fandom for that monstrous movement. No one gets into a KKK cloak by accident. Kneecap expect us to believe that even though they’ve waved the Hezbollah flag, they don’t actually support Hezbollah And yet Kneecap expect us to believe that even though they’ve waved the Hezbollah flag and hollered ‘Up Hezbollah!’, they don’t actually support Hezbollah.

How did it come to this? How did we arrive at a situation where it fell to a court of law to tell us what a woman is? That’s my overriding emotion today. I’m delighted the Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is legally defined as a person with female biological characteristics. But I’m gobsmacked that we apparently needed five judges to tell us something our species has known since we first came down from the trees. What sweet relief the judges made the right decision. But the garlands should go to For Women Scotland The ruling of the Supreme Court is fantastically sensible. It unambiguously states that the sex-based rights outlined in the Equality Act 2010 are based on biological sex. So where the Act refers to ‘women’, it means biological women.

We are all betrayed by our body language eventually. It’s our inner quisling, itching to expose to the world the feelings our more sentient side would prefer to keep hidden. Yesterday it was Jess Phillips’s turn to be snitched on by her own mannerisms. The surliness with which she listened to MPs speak about the ‘grooming gang’ scandal was a true mask-off moment. Without words it told us all we need to know about this government. Ms Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, came to the chamber to tell MPs that the government might not proceed with the five inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’ promised by the Home Secretary. Instead there’ll be a ‘more flexible’ approach, possibly including the setting up of victim-led local ‘panels’.

Israel’s denial of entry to two Labour MPs is a truly shaming moment. Not for Israel, which, like all sovereign states, is perfectly at liberty to permit or deny entry to anyone it chooses. No, for Labour. That our ally, the Jewish nation, is so wary of Britain’s ruling party that it felt compelled to banish two of its representatives should generate some serious soul-searching in Labour. The flap over Israel’s ejection of the MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang has been mad. It’s the hissy fit heard around the world. Leafy London is up in arms. ‘I am outraged’, thundered Emily Thornberry on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. Israel will ‘rue the day that they did this to British parliamentarians’, she said. What’s she going to do – write a mean tweet?

So Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, is in favour of building airports now? That’s a turnaround. In January she railed against Labour party leader Keir Starmer when he dropped his opposition to a third runway at Heathrow. To execute such a U-turn in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ is ‘reckless, short-sighted and indefensible’, she cried. ‘The planet’ will suffer thanks to Sir Keir, she warned. Yet now she’s all about airport construction. Suddenly she loves it. Not here, though. Not for us undeserving Brits. No, it’s in Mirpur in Kashmir that she wants to see terminals being erected and runways constructed.

‘Céad míle fáilte’, the Irish love to say. It means ‘a hundred thousand welcomes’. It’s emblazoned in the arrivals hall at Dublin airport. You’ll see it written in the Celtic font on the walls of Ireland’s cosy pubs. It has led to Ireland being christened ‘the land of a thousand welcomes’, where all visitors, no matter their heritage, will be greeted with a hearty hug. The tragic truth is that Ireland is awash with Israelophobia Well, not all. There’s one group of people to whom Ireland’s famed friendliness seems not to extend. ‘Zionists are not welcome in Ireland’, barks an Irish leftie at an Israeli gentleman in a chilling video clip that is going viral. ‘F**k you and f**k Israel’, she says and then spits on him.

If you’re a foreigner who hates Jews, should you be allowed to move to Britain? For me it’s a no-brainer: absolutely not. The safety and dignity of Britain’s Jews count for infinitely more than the ‘rights’ of a racist migrant. Does the Labour government agree? Does it agree that overseas anti-Semites are not welcome here? We are about to find out. There are disturbing reports emerging that a man from Gaza with very iffy views has arrived in Britain. He goes by the name Abu Wadee. He is said to be an ‘influencer’ with a substantial following on social media. Last week he reportedly posted a video of himself sporting a keffiyeh while crammed onto a dinghy in the English Channel. ‘Thank God, we arrived in Britain’, the video caption said.

Perusing the Zelensky-bashing of the Very Online right, I found myself thinking: ‘This reminds me of something.’ The branding of Ukraine's president as a ‘welfare queen’ who is draining America’s coffers. The libelling of Ukraine as a uniquely corrupt nation whose thirst for war threatens to damn all of mankind to disaster. The shameful blaming of Ukraine for its own invasion, as if Russia had no choice but to violently rebuke its uppity, vexing neighbour. Ukraineophobia and Israelophobia are both blights on the body politic Then it struck me: Ukraine is to the cranky right what Israel is to the mad left. Their Zelensky Derangement Syndrome creepily mirrors the frenzied loathing for Israel that has been infecting leftists for years.