When I was a schoolboy, on the rare occasions I was required to line up against the wall to be picked for a football team, I would be picked last. It was fair enough: my abilities matched my interest level – zero. Not much has changed in the intervening decades, and thanks to my lack of any real knowledge or ability in the game, I would be most unlikely to comment on the World Cup or the Euros. But when it comes to coverage of Israel and the Middle East, I’ve spent enough time on the ground amassing knowledge, sources, and experience that this publication entrusts me to explain it to others.

Now, if I were a football expert – I don’t know, let’s say the BBC’s highest-paid presenter – I might apply the same logic in reverse: talk as much as I like about the game, but steer clear of discussions of Israel and the Middle East. Particularly if I had fronted the BBC’s coverage of a World Cup hosted by Qatar – a regime notorious for its abuses of migrant workers, its hostility to free speech, and its refusal to recognise Israel – while simultaneously posturing as a defender of human rights. Gary Lineker did just that: he denounced the tournament’s moral failings in pre-scripted segments, then proceeded to anchor the coverage from Doha without missing a game or a paycheque.

Despite, to state the obvious, not being known for his expertise on the region, Lineker appears determined to share his lack of insight with millions, trading on the fame he accrued through publicly funded sports programming. Even if his social media soapboxing didn’t violate the BBC’s supposed impartiality rules (it does), he’d still do well to refrain from repeatedly exposing the limits of his intellect. But here we are.

This week’s instalment of Lineker vs Nuance involves his sharing of a video titled ‘Zionism explained in less than two minutes’, produced by a group called ‘Palestine Lobby’ and featuring commentary from Diana Buttu, a former PLO spokesperson. It included, helpfully, an image of a rat next to the title – because when you want to educate the public about a the decades long Palestinian opposition to the Jewish state, it’s always best to reach for the iconography of Nazi propaganda.

But the rat wasn’t even the worst part. The video which Lineker enthusiastically reposted tells us that Zionism is the idea of ‘privileging and giving exclusive rights to one group of people at the expense of another,’ and that no Zionist can claim to believe in equal rights for Palestinians. It’s a neat package for the TikTok era: inaccurate, inflammatory and devoid of history. One might call it anti-Zionism for the ADHD generation.

When I’m addressing audiences on this topic, I often get asked about whether I ‘support Israel’ or ‘support Palestine’ – as though I were choosing sides in a Champions League final, to choose an analogy that Lineker might be able to comprehend. That concept has always felt alien: whatever gene makes people feel tribal loyalty toward a group of athletes kicking a ball around is clearly absent in me. I’ve never felt the need to wear colours, chant slogans – or pretend that morally complex conflicts can be resolved simply by chanting louder than the other side.

Lineker appears to think he’s speaking truth to power, when in fact he is power

And yet, this is exactly the mode in which Lineker and his ilk approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s football fandom masquerading as foreign policy. You’re either ‘Team Palestine’ or ‘Team Israel’ – no knowledge or context needed, just an instinctive sense of who your side is, and an insult or emoji to really drive home your point.

Lineker has brought a similar level of sophistication, or lack thereof, to his past political musings. He has compared the UK’s immigration policy to 1930s Germany (a nuanced historical take, if you’re in Year 9), reposted egregious claims of Israeli genocide without evidence or reference to Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians, and supported banning Israel from international football altogether. He later claimed not to understand the posts he was sharing – a defence that was somehow both pathetic and plausible.

But this latest episode is different. The use of the rat image, whether witting or unwitting, invokes one of the oldest and most pernicious anti-Semitic tropes in existence. If his grasp of Nazi dehumanisation was sharp enough to denounce Suella Braverman’s talk of immigrant ‘invasion’ and criminality as disturbingly reminiscent of the 1930s, then it is hard to understand his apparent comfort in sharing an image of a rat to symbolise Jews – a grotesque trope lifted straight from Nazi propaganda. That Lineker deleted his post and apologised matters less than the fact he shared it in the first place.

And all of this once again highlights the BBC’s craven posture. Their guidelines clearly state that flagship presenters must not share their own views on contentious political matters. Lineker helped them write those very guidelines, which now serve mainly as a monument to the broadcaster’s own impotence. He flouts them because he can. He tweets, deletes and shrugs. He knows no one at the BBC will touch him. He’s like the schoolyard tyrant who somehow got a seat at the table to rewrite the rules on bullying – only to break them loudly and often, just to prove he can.

The tragicomic heart of this saga is that Lineker appears to think he’s speaking truth to power, when in fact he is power. Rich, famous, protected by a bloated institution terrified to lose him even as he is on his way out, he punches downward – at a minority group ever more uncomfortable with unbridled hatred – and pretends it’s a moral stand. The smug self-regard of someone who has never had to learn the basics of the topics he pontificates on is almost impressive in its audacity.

Personally, I don’t expect much better from a man whose worldview was apparently formed on social media. But I do demand better from our national broadcaster. The tragedy isn’t that Lineker believes these things – it’s that no one high up at the BBC seems to care that he does.