RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: English football bosses love players taking the knee. So why won’t they offer a gesture of support to Jewish victims of Hamas’s racist butchers?
The Wembley Stadium arch looms large over North-West London. On a clear night, illuminated by thousands of multi-coloured LED bulbs, it dominates the skyline for miles around.
The 133-metre structure is clearly visible from the suburbs which are home to the vast majority of London’s Jewish community — Barnet, Finchley, Hendon and Golders Green.
From the top of the Brent Cross flyover, the stadium looks like an alien spaceship has landed at the side of the North Circular Road. In recent years, the arch has been lit up in an assortment of colours to show support for everyone and everything from LGBTQWERTY+ campaigners, the NHS and the late Captain Sir Tom Moore, to the people of Ukraine.
There’s nothing the FA likes more than an ostentatious display of virtue signalling. So when the Government asked the football authorities to display the colours of the Israeli flag on the arch for tonight’s friendly international between England and Australia, it should have been an open goal.
The Government is urging UK sports bodies to pay their respects to the victims of recent violence in Israel
Sustained airstrikes on Gaza from Israel have left around 900 people in the enclave dead
The Israeli flag was projected on 10 Downing Street on Sunday evening in London
It would have been a welcome beacon of reassurance to Britain’s Jews, who have had to endure a disgusting surge in anti-Semitic hatred in the wake of the Hamas atrocities in Israel.
Yet this evening, the arch will remain neutral, if not dark. The FA is said to fear that any overt gesture of support for Israel would provoke a ‘backlash’.
READ MORE: UK Government urges sports bodies to pay respect to the victims of the violence in Israel with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer calling for Wembley’s arch to be lit up when England face Australia on Friday
What kind of backlash isn’t specified. Is the FA frightened that thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators will turn up at Wembley and cause trouble?
The FA has never been afraid to take sides in the past. It rarely misses an opportunity to swathe itself in rainbow colours to promote gay and trans rights — even though this includes the ‘right’ of biological males to use female changing rooms and toilets, an anathema to most women, and male-bodied rapists to be sent to female prisons.
After the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, 4,000 miles away, players in England started ‘taking the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter. Three-and-a-half years on, they’re still at it.
Will they continue to do so, now that BLM UK has enthusiastically shared a social media posting featuring a Hamas bulldozer smashing down an Israeli security fence and BLM Chicago posted an image of a Hamas terrorist entering Israel on a hanglider?
Every time footballers perform this fatuous gesture, commentators are contractually bound to remind us that it is our duty to ‘oppose racism in all its forms’.
So how is the FA going to square that with refusing to show solidarity with Israelis, who have suffered the most heinous slaughter at the hands of a virulently racist terrorist organisation dedicated to wiping Jews off the face of the Earth?
What message does that send out to loyal Jewish supporters of clubs such as Tottenham, Arsenal and Leeds? Arsenal’s Jewish Gooners supporters’ group said they felt abandoned by the game they love, and for all the FA’s pious posturing on other issues, they clearly don’t consider Jewish fans to be part of the so-called ‘football family’.
Since the Hamas pogroms began at the weekend, British Jews have been on the receiving end of a stream of vile threats and abuse. Anti-Semitic incidents quadrupled in the three days after the attacks. Security has been stepped up at schools and synagogues, as pro-Hamas demonstrators have ‘celebrated’ in the streets.
It was also projected on the House of Commons in Westminster and several other buildings
Over 1,200 people were killed over the weekend as Hamas terrorists rampaged through towns in southern Israel
Destroyed cars near the Kibbutz Re’im, close to the Gaza Strip border on October 10
A house left in ruins after an attack by Hamas militants on this kibbutz days earlier when dozens of civilians were killed near the border with Gaza on Tuesday
The fear currently being experienced in our Jewish communties was encapsulated graphically in a deeply moving and seriously disturbing personal account by Nicole Lampert in yesterday’s Mail.
The Prime Minister went to a synagogue in Finchley to reassure our Jewish friends and neighbours that Britain stands both with them and Israel. Is it too much to ask the FA to do the same? If professional football always resisted the temptation to insert itself into identity politics and international affairs, I could understand why it decided to sit this one out. But the FA and the Premier League jump on every passing bandwagon.
READ MORE: FA will hold talks over whether to illuminate Wembley arch with the colours of Israel’s flag during England’s friendly against Australia amid concerns of a potential backlash following Hamas’ terror attacks
It’s cynical, cost-free compassion is designed to camouflage the rampant venality of one of the most amoral industries on Earth.
So perhaps the FA can explain what’s the difference between expressing solidarity with the people of Ukraine following the Russian invasion, and supporting the people of Israel, who have suffered equally murderous war crimes committed by Hamas?
They might also enlighten us as to the nature of the ‘backlash’ they are reported to fear. Backlash from whom, precisely?
Do they have intelligence that any display of support for Israel would have provoked a Manchester Arena-style attack at tonight’s friendly? Frankly, I doubt it.
No, much nearer the truth is the incontrovertible fact that football is increasingly in hock to Middle Eastern sports-washing money.
FIFA, football’s governing body to which the FA is affiliated, is bought and paid for by Arab wealth. That explains why the last World Cup was awarded to oil-rich Qatar, which offers sanctuary to Islamist terrorists.
Yesterday, the former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal, broadcasting from Qatar, praised his fellow terrorists and called on Muslims worldwide to rise up against Israel in a ‘global day of jihad’.
Does anyone seriously believe that the FA is unaware of Qatar’s backing of Hamas? Surely not.
Qatar is currently trying to buy its way into the Premier League and earlier this year made a bid for Manchester United. Talks are also reported to have taken place with Spurs and two other clubs.
English football may pose as a champion of human rights, but when Middle Eastern filthy lucre is up for grabs, all principle goes out of the window.
Never was there a less appropriate venue than Qatar for the World Cup — and not just because of the climate in the desert kingdom.
Qatar has a dismal record of persecuting homosexuals, treating women as second-class citizens and condoning modern slavery. Quite apart from the fact that it owes its vast wealth to fossil fuels, at a time when football is burnishing its Net Zero credentials.
Yet FIFA managed to overlook any such qualms.
The body of a woman is covered with a blanket in Kfar Azza
Israeli soldiers walk next to the body of Hamas militant killed in Kfar Aza kibbutz on Tuesday
And England’s super-woke FA thought it could salve its conscience by encouraging players to wear rainbow armbands.
That lasted about as long as a snowball in the Sahara and was immediately dropped after FIFA said any display of support for gay rights — in a country where homosexuality is a capital offence — would be punished by an automatic yellow card. So much for solidarity with Stonewall.
Gary Lineker did deliver a rambling monologue about yuman rites before the first game, but his plea of mitigation didn’t stop the Beckhams and Nevilles of this world taking the Qatari shilling.
Curiously, Lineker, who pontificates on everything from illegal migration to world affairs on social media, has remained silent on the Hamas atrocities in Israel.
Nothing, either, from his Match Of The Day sidekick Alan Shearer, the former England and Newcastle United captain.
Could this have anything to do with the fact that Newcastle’s majority shareholder is Saudi Arabia, another mega-rich Arab state which supports the Palestinian cause — as does Abu Dhabi, which owns Manchester City, the current Premier League and European champions? The Saudis are blaming Israel for the horrendous violence inflicted upon its citizens.
As thousands of Hamas apologists prepare to demonstrate outside the Israeli embassy tomorrow and British Jews have to walk under bridges in North London daubed with pro-Palestinian slogans, a shining beacon of support from Wembley would have been at least a token gesture to reassure them they are not alone.
Lord Mann, one of the staunchest supporters of Israel and our own Jewish community, said lighting up the arch would be ’empowering’.
Sadly, though predictably, the spineless FA bottled it. What we are seeing tonight is English football in its true colours.
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