Lineker risks another BBC row with Gaza ‘racism’ letter

Gary Lineker is due to leave Match Of The Day at the end of the season – but will the football pundit turned activist even make it to then?

Lineker, whose departure from the BBC’s flagship football show has been painted as a cost-cutting exercise but is widely believed to be linked to his willingness to express progressive political views, has raised eyebrows at the Beeb by signing an open letter criticising in the strongest terms the Beeb’s decision to pull controversial documentary Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone from its iPlayer streaming service.

The letter, which is addressed to BBC chair Samir Shah, director general Tim Davie and chief content officer Charlotte Moore, says that suspending the programme when it became clear that its 13-year-old narrator Abdullah Al-Yazouri was the son of a deputy minister in the Hamas-run government in Gaza means the BBC have fallen for “a racist trope” about Palestinians.

The letter says: “Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri served as Gaza’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture, a civil service role concerned with food production. Conflating such governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanising. This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence – a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences…

“We call on you to reject attempts to have the documentary permanently removed or subjected to undue disavowals. Capitulating to such attempts to block its reinstatement on iPlayer would signal that: Palestinian children’s stories are only valid if their families pass arbitrary “purity tests” (and) racialised smears against Palestinians outweigh journalistic ethics and public interest.”

It adds of a campaign against the programme: “Silencing a child’s firsthand account of survival in Gaza, where over 13,000 children have been killed since October 2023, is not about compliance but about erasing Palestinian suffering. The BBC must resist political pressure aimed at suppressing narratives that humanise Palestinians.”

Signing the letter will doubtless lead to more criticism of Lineker, who will continue to front the BBC’s coverage of next season’s FA Cup and the 2026 World Cup even after leaving MoTD. He was briefly suspended by the BBC in 2023 after an outcry led by right wing newspapers and populist politicians over a social media post in which he called a statement by then home secretary Suella Braverman an “immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

A review of the BBC’s social media guidelines followed, which concluded that high-profile presenters could express their views on issues but steer clear of political campaigning. It did not mention explicit criticism of the BBC itself.

In addition to Lineker, the letter is also signed by film director Mike Leigh, musician Brian Eno and actors Harriet Walter, Riz Ahmed, Peter Mullan, Indira Varma, Charles Dance, Juliet Stevenson, Ruth Negga, Miriam Margolyes, Jason Fleymng, David Hayman and others.