The Moral Decay of Feminism
The Killing of Children to Preserve “Civilizational” Values
During a week when even the BBC began to question whether Israel might have genocidal intent, one might have expected at least some feminist commentary on the grim fate endured by Palestinians. Almost three months of blocked humanitarian aid, along with the indiscriminate killing and maiming of women, children, and men over the past 20 months, should surely have sparked outrage from feminist journalists and social commentators. However, a brief review of various commentaries reveals none.
Suzanne Moore wrote an article published in the Telegraph that broke this trend. It is ostensibly about Gary Lineker, the football commentator and BBC presenter, who was recently let go by the BBC. For several months, he has been condemning Israel’s appalling assault on Gaza. When he reposted a pro-Palestinian Instagram clip featuring a rat emoji, it became the last straw for the BBC. Uncharacteristically, Moore sided with the establishment and fully endorsed the BBC’s decision that Lineker should have kept his anti-Semitic opinions to himself.
By doing this, Moore has revealed more about her politics than she intended. However, more important than her personal views, which are typically appreciated for their intelligence, sharp wit, and defiant sass—though here they come across as clone-like—I argue that this article serves as a canary in the coal mine. It indicates the rumblings of the death knell of a feminist movement that is losing its intellectual engagement with all issues except for one: transgenderism and gender identity. Feminism is losing its way and moral compass, following the path of most resistance movements and drifting toward the reactionary authoritarianism of the far-right.
Given the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Moore advises Lineker to exercise caution in his moral condemnation. She throws caution to the wind herself, however, and is filled with moral chastisement—not of Israel (or Palestine), but of Lineker and his appeal to humanitarian values. In doing so, she ignites feminist passions. She reminds us that a man like Lineker, who has a public platform, betrayed women when he could have stood with us, for example, on the issue of women’s sports. She declares, “Gary is the kind of liberal type,” who is high on “conceit” but low on bravery. If only he had had “the balls” off the football pitch to speak out on women’s rights.
In a move unworthy of her, she employs a persuasive rhetorical device (at least to gender-critical feminists) to support her ideological position: that since Lineker was mistaken about transgenderism, ipso facto, he is also incorrect in his assessment of Israel.
Remembering the Holocaust is good! Remembering the Nakba is bad!
Moore suggests that Linker educate himself out of his progressive naiveté by listening to the alleged balanced authority of the Jewish historian Simon Schama, an art critic and cook, and himself, a BBC presenter. In her view, Schama challenges Lineker’s simplistic version of the conflict: “The whole issue here is that guys like Lineker do not know the complexity of this issue and never seem to want to be schooled by those [like Schama] who do.”
Schama labels people who use the term genocide as “antisemites.” In March, he delivered a lecture focusing on the alleged “toxic” spread of antisemitism among the West’s “younger generation.” He stated that a BBC documentary he was commissioned to create on the Holocaust, The Road to Auschwitz, was his attempt to “resist the temptation to dilute, to moderate, to universalise.”
This raises an obvious question: why should people, young or old, avoid universalizing the Holocaust? As a historian, Schama should learn other lessons from history: victims can become perpetrators. He engages in the kind of Jewish identity politics reminiscent of the quasi-religious beliefs of transactivists. He implies that there is something that distinguishes Jews from the rest of us mortals—a sort of inner soul acquired through historical suffering that grants what journalist Jonathan Cook describes as a special dispensation from the passions of hate, revenge, sexism, and (in this case) racism.
Schama tweeted against Louis Theroux for his BBC documentary, The Settlers, which provides a rare, close-up view of the daily violence faced by Palestinians in the West Bank—a significant shift in production for the BBC, which is rarely critical of Israel. In Hebron, the settlers display particular brutality (backed by the Israeli Occupying Force). Schama refrains from commenting; instead, he asserts that Jews—even those born in the United States—have a right to return to Hebron following an incident in 1929 under the British Mandate when Muslim Arabs massacred 69 Jews who had fled from Hebron.
Theroux displays “incredible ignorance,” according to Schama, “or willed avoidance of the history of the Jewish community in Hebron, unbroken (since Biblical times) over centuries until the 1929 massacre.” Theroux’s documentary highlights the impact of the settlers’ presence on the lives of millions of Palestinians in their homeland and, in doing so, challenges the myth that Israel is a civilised liberal democracy surrounded by individuals who are hardly better than animals. The settlers believe they are divinely entitled to drive the Palestinians from their homes, revealing the terrifying normalcy of their beliefs and actions. The film is not about the Ben-Gvirs of the Israeli government, himself a settler, who openly calls for ethnic cleansing; it focuses on the normalization of injustice, not only through violence but also through indifference to the humanity of Palestinians. This mentality is now heavily represented in the Israeli government and military, about which Schama remains silent.
Let us now turn to the perspectives of another scholar, the Palestinian political analyst and human rights lawyer, Diana Buttu. She offers a two-minute overview of the history of Zionism and its tragic effects on Palestinians. It was these words that Lineker reposted. Buttu says:
Zionists claimed land in 1948 that wasn’t theirs […] The notion of creating not only a Jewish state but also at the expense of an indigenous Palestinian population endorses the idea of granting exclusive rights to one group of people. This isn’t liberal or about equality. There isn’t a single Zionist who can genuinely claim that Palestinians have the exact same rights as Israelis, and this is the fundamental problem with Zionism.
Buttu points out that Israel racially discriminates in its right of return; it grants this right to Jews from distant parts of the world who have no historical connection to Palestine while cruelly and illegally denying it to Palestinians. During the Nakba, Palestinians were dispossessed and displaced, often through murder and rape or the fear of it, from the land they have inhabited for centuries. Her family is one such example.
An unauthorized cartoon rat emoji, not approved by Buttu, was placed in the top left corner of the post's title by an unknown Instagram user. Lineker deleted the post once it was pointed out and apologized, stating he wouldn’t have reposted had he noticed the rat and its connotation.
Moore describes Buttu’s words as “an anti-Zionist rant by a Canadian-Palestinian professor accompanied by a rat emoji.” “While Lineker says he is moved to speak out over humanitarian causes, let’s agree not to compare humans to vermin.” “That Jews are rats, vermin, is an anti-Semitic trope, and no nitpicking over the lines between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism excuses it.” It is precisely this type of “dehumanizing,” she argues, that has harmed Lineker’s career at the BBC.
While Moore is exercised by Lineker’s inadvertent retweeting of a cartoon rat emoji, she does not comment on the Israeli government’s fervent, unapologetic, and transparent dehumanization of Palestinians as animals to galvanize support for genocide.
The genocidal intent was pervasive on social media from the beginning: The Israeli government stated exactly what it intended to do. Netanyahu showcased his religious fundamentalism with pride, comparing Palestinians to the Amalekites, whose injuries to the ancient tribe of Israel “our holy Bible tells us never to forget.” Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, declared, “There will be no water, no food, no electricity or fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals, and we will act accordingly.” The former Israeli Ambassador to the UN confessed he is “very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people and these awful inhuman animals.”
In the same week that Moore decried Lineker for dehumanisation of a people by tweet, the former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin was televised declaring the enemy is not Hamas but all Gazans: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy—every child to whom you are giving milk will grow up to rape your daughter and slaughter your children. Not a single child should remain. This is about justice.”
Only last week Netanyahu stated, “This war is against good and evil.” “We are fighting human animals, monsters.” Yes, 600 days after Israel slaughtered entire families and burned children alive. Who, we may ask, are the human animals?
The organization Just Jews points out that “plenty of pro-Israel activists have posted images portraying Palestinians as rats. How many of them have lost their jobs?”
To my knowledge, gender-critical feminists have never agreed against comparing Palestinian humans to vermin, which is a guiding first principle, according to Moore’s own words, of recognizing the humanity of a people.
Perhaps Moore could heed her own advice and, instead of criticizing Lineker for his alleged ignorance, educate herself about the political complexity she purportedly lauds. She might consider the perspectives of various historians and scholars who draw different conclusions than Schama.
Palestinian history professor Rashid Khalidi documents the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and argues that it is the fundamental right of any people to narrate their history on their own terms. Alternatively, if Moore believes that Khalidi’s Palestinian heritage gives him inherent bias, while Schama’s Jewish heritage makes him inherently neutral, she could listen to the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who says, “Zionism is racism. Israel is an apartheid state.” She could also read the work of distinguished Israeli history professor Ilan Pappe, who writes about the myths that uphold the idea that Israel is a democracy.
Regardless of Moore's opinions on these professorial views (if she has any), Lineker is not ignorant of their overall arguments and addresses them:
October 7 was awful, but it’s very important to know your history and to study the massacres that happened before this, many of them against the Palestinian people. Yes, Israelis have a right to defend themselves. But it appears that Palestinians don’t—and that is where it’s wrong. Palestinians are caged in this outdoor prison in Gaza, and now it’s an outdoor prison that they’re bombing. Israel says it’s self-defence, but really? Self-defence against what now? Yes, I understand that they needed to avenge, but I don’t think they’ve helped their own hostages […] The Israeli occupation was inevitably going to cause massive problems.
Moore insists that “some humility [from Lineker] would be in order.” It is patronizing of her to assume that Lineker’s views on Israel’s assault on Gaza are uninformed because, as a footballer and commentator, he knows nothing of the history and politics. If a man suggested gender-critical women stay in their lane and stick to issues about which they have direct knowledge, for example, lived experience in a female body, she would be furious at his arrogance. Moore wishes she had the confidence of “dudes” to wax lyrical about topics of which they know nothing. One could argue that this article demonstrates she fully possesses it!
Feminist dehumanizing of Palestinian women
The backlash to Lineker’s post was swift. The Board of Deputies of British Jews demanded he be dismissed rather than leave on his terms, and there was an uproar among Jewish BBC staff. Jewish GB News presenter Josh Howie, who has previously participated in criticism of the BBC for double standards, along with Nicole Lampert, a gender-critical Jewish feminist journalist and contributor to the Jewish Chronicle, celebrated his dismissal.
Moore participated in the collective name-calling of Lineker as a blatant anti-Semite, which is particularly disturbing given her experiences as a target of a crowd intent on her career downfall. She was disgracefully bullied by journalists eager to drive her out of the Guardian on the grounds of her alleged blatant transphobia.
The idea of BBC impartiality is a charade. It allowed Lineker to criticize Qatar's human rights record when the 2022 World Cup was held there; why should the line be drawn only when he publicly takes issue with Israel’s human rights abuses? The historian William Dalrymple asks: Isn't the point of the BBC, which identifies itself as politically impartial, to protect free speech and speak truth to power rather than cave to populist bullying?
Moore describes Lineker’s cancellation by the BBC as a “fall from the moral high ground” that will be “cushioned by like-minded apologists who cheer him on.” His supporters will view it as the result of his being “too caring, for being so empathetic, for crying at the awful images of murdered children coming out of Gaza." "He has been punished for being too brave for the BBC.” His supporters do say that, and they are right!
The revenge mass murder of babies and children is a grotesque abomination, even when Israel is the perpetrator! Speaking out, as Lineker does, against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the dispossession of homes, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, and the intentional infliction of humanitarian disaster on a population is not anti-Semitism. While the historical roots of anti-Semitism run deep, ethnoreligious fanaticism, which brutally dismisses the human rights of Palestinians, deserves his outright moral condemnation.
The human rights organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports that since October 2023, the Israeli Occupying Force has killed an average of 21.3 women per day through direct bombardment alone, which equates to about one Palestinian woman every hour. Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, reminds us that “in any other circumstance, the deliberate killing of at least 21 women per day would have been considered a feminist emergency, a global scandal, led by countries that profess to center "feminism" in their foreign policies. Not if the one killed is a Palestinian woman.”
Nicole Lampert previously made completely unsubstantiated allegations against Alsalem, smearing her as an anti-Semite who is concerned about violence against all women except those who are Jewish.
Who would have expected that it would be Lineker, not a feminist, who cried out in horror at the suffering of Palestinian pediatrician and mother Alaa al-Najjar, whose children were murdered by Israel, charred, dismembered, and burned beyond recognition while she worked to save the lives of others? Or that it would be Lineker who expressed moral outrage at the sight of a little girl, six-year-old Ward Jalal Al-Shaikh Khalil, fleeing a blaze following overnight Israeli airstrikes on a school where her family had sought refuge, unaware that her mother and two siblings had been killed?
Moore expresses concern for the “horrific destruction of Gaza.” Yes, sadly, women's and children’s lives are being sacrificed for Israel’s cause. Still, war is war, and although such loss is appalling, what is a liberal democratic country like Israel supposed to do when faced with extinction by Hamas? Riddle me this, she continues:
How is a two-state solution possible when Hamas remains in power? Those who think Israel should not exist in the first place—and there are many—are going to have to explain what happens to half of the world’s Jewish population who live there.
An answer to Moore might be that the pleas for a two-state solution from Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy were always disingenuous. How serious was their push for any political solution when they won’t even attempt to stop a genocide?
“Sleeping with the enemy”
Moore describes Lineker as suffering from “the ultimate liberal delusion; that somehow one sits aloft, above others who cannot see what is good and what is bad. There live the self-proclaimed good, and everyone else is, well, a little unhuman.” He is “living in a bubble populated by fellow Lefties who think they know better than everyone else.”
Moore thus employs the same tropes regarding those who are deeply troubled by Israel and its lawlessness, as self-declared feminist Zionists and Friends of Israel. In more crude terms, one high-profile feminist often refers to these alleged “Lefties” as “the woke blue-haired brigade.”
According to Moore’s criteria, the Jewish philosophers Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber would also exhibit a holier-than-thou liberal arrogance. Indeed, so would Albert Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Nazism. Each set strict boundaries between right and wrong, asserting that an ethnoreligious state born out of terrorism was not only unjust to the indigenous Palestinian Arabs but would also be detrimental to Jews, inevitably leading to Israel’s eventual downfall.
In a classic example of “every accusation is a confession,” Moore does exactly what she criticizes Lineker for. She scolds him for hypocrisy in claiming alleged neutrality on transgenderism and women’s rights, while raising his voice about the abuse of Palestinian women’s human rights. “He cannot present himself as “neutral” in one context and “brave” in another.” Moore mirrors his blindness about harm, but in reverse. She is silent about the material suffering of Palestinian women and children but vocal about male power and violence against women in the UK.
Moore’s “neutrality” is complicity with the religious and nationalist far-right, where brute masculinism is on open display. Only this week, a US Republican Senator suggested Gaza be “nuked" like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Israel, a parliamentarian in the Knesset was manhandled off the Parliament podium, not for breaking a rule, but for speaking the truth: “Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, the world is witnessing a second Nakba unfold in Gaza.” In the UK, Starmer and Lammy have begun to vigorously distance themselves from the killing. Yet, at the very same time, flight tracking information showed that, on one night this week, the UK sent a military transport plane, which can carry weapons and soldiers, from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus to Tel Aviv and then dispatched a spy plane over Gaza to collect intelligence.
Kellie-Jay Keen and Graham Linehan exemplify the inurement to Palestinian suffering among the majority of gender critics. Where gender-critical feminism once condemned Keen as a “Poundshop Marine Le Pen,” she now voices their incipient racism. She characterizes the conflict as a struggle between “civilization” and fundamentalist Islam rather than between Occupier and Occupied. Where Linehan was once deeply compassionate about children and the harm done to their bodies and psyches by “gender medicine,” he now justifies the murder of Palestinian babies because they are “Hamas babies.” He denies that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. Such information, he declares, is fake, “Brought to you by Hamas spending all that Qatari money on hideyholes beneath their own people.”
The Nazis persuaded the ordinary decent German folk to tolerate the assault and murder of Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies. They did not beat citizens over the head to achieve compliance; rather, they re-arranged the moral order such that exterminating “undesirables” was believed by citizens to be morally righteous.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault describes this phenomenon as a technology of modern government: compliance with political power is most effectively achieved by encouraging populations to transform themselves, of their own free will, into the kinds of subjects who self-police their thoughts and values. Support for German fascism was cultivated by dehumanizing Jews as vermin and inciting a visceral disgust within the German population. There are many parallels and continuities between the political economy of 1930s Nazi Germany and the political economy of the West since 2020. In a dreadful repetition of history, accepting the slaughter of Palestinians is accomplished through the same techniques, leading us to repeat the history we vowed to avoid 80 years ago: “Never Again.” Lineker cites George Orwell, who says, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Dr. Gabor Maté, son of Hungarian Jewish refugees and an esteemed psychotherapist specializing in childhood trauma, says of Zionists and their allies:
I am not angry. I’m totally enraged. We are living through one of the worst crimes in human history. To preserve the civilizational values of the West, it is now necessary to blow up mosques, level libraries, incinerate olive trees, wear the underwear of the women whose houses you have destroyed, parade captives in their underwear, kill children for throwing stones, all in case the uncivilised might win.
Maté argues that this particular genocide, more than any other, is the moral issue of our time. It is conducted in our name, and our governments supply the military resources.
Who would have thought that feminists—a political movement resisting male power and challenging the core tenets that support it—would support Israel? Many women who found solace in the gender-critical movement are now hesitant to recognize the ample evidence before them and condemn Israel for committing war crimes, fearing that fellow feminists will police them. I offer a suggestion: while you wait for the appalling feminist herd mentality on Israel to fracture publicly (as it is doing internally), why not stand firm and say, “No, you do not speak in my name?” You will be labelled an anti-Semite, but ultimately, who cares? We’ve endured accusations of transphobia for years. It is perhaps time now to “woman up” further and defy our own “kind.” On the issue of Palestine, I prefer to share a bed (metaphorically speaking!) with Lineker than with gender-critical feminism. As Lineker says, at the end of the day, “you have to live with yourself … that’s the important thing.” Amen to that!
 | A guest post by
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I have lived in Palestine, shared the hospitality of families, dressed as I liked, walked the streets freely (including on my own at night), and worked with a gay male colleague who was equally free.
It seems the ignorance of Palestine is yours, madam, not mine.
As for your other political points, such as they are, my essay addresses them.
Thank you so much.