Fury as Gary Lineker reposts call for Israel to be banned from international football

15 January 2024, 06:58 | Updated: 15 January 2024, 08:28

Gary Lineker has sparked outrage among Tory MPs after resharing a post calling for Israel to be banned from international football.

The Match of the Day presenter reposted a statement from a pro-Palestinian campaign calling for Israel to be removed from tournaments "until it ends its grave violations of international law".

The post - from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel - also included a statement from the Palestinian Football Association.

It called on Fifa and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to align with other global sporting bodies by introducing sanctions.

The post read: "The Palestinian Football Association calls on @iocmedia, @FIFAcom and all regional and int'l sports bodies to take an urgent stance on Israel’s grave violations of human rights and subject it to legal accountability measures."

Read more: UK to send 20,000 troops to largest Nato military exercise since the Cold War in response to Russian aggression

Read more: Sunak under pressure over Rwanda bill as senior right-wingers demand changes before crunch vote

Lineker's latest move has sparked a backlash from Tory MPs, who have called for him to be sanctioned.

It comes after his controversial comments last year, in which he said the government rhetoric over the Rwanda Bill was not dissimilar from 1930s Germany.

Tory MP Andrew Percy told The Telegraph: "Gary Lineker is an ill-informed, ignorant commentator on the Middle East.

"The BDS movement [to boycott Israel] is a racist, anti-Semitic campaign and nobody who receives taxpayers' money working in the BBC should be endorsing a campaign that is widely understood to promote Jew hate."

Lee Anderson, the party's deputy chairman, said: “Licence fee payers are fed up of footing the bill for Lineker’s musings on international politics.

“It’s about time BBC bosses decided whether Gary’s right-on rubbish is in keeping with their social media rulebook.”

Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent North Jonathan Gullis said: “Hamas harms the people they claim to represent, stealing aid off the people of Gaza, using innocent Gazans as human shields and throwing LGBT+ people off buildings. All this whilst their leaders live a life of luxury in Qatar.

“We wait for international diplomat and foreign policy expert, Gary Lineker, to call this out soon.”

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: "Gary Lineker has a lot to say about a lot of things, but antisemitism does not appear to be one of them.

"At a time of record levels of racism against Jews, not a peep. But he has found the time to amplify a call to suspend the world's only Jewish state from international sports. His priorities are clear."

A BBC source told the paper: "We aren't going to give a commentary on individuals or individual tweets."