When Neutrality Is an Inhumane Choice

I’ve recently come across two great commentaries on the Gary Lineker/BBC controversy in the United Kingdom. The first is by a fellow Australian I’ve long admired, Craig Foster (pictured above). A retired soccer player, human rights activist and sports analyst, Foster had an insightful op-ed in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald. Following are excerpts.

In sending a tweet critical of the UK’s Australian-exported approach to asylum seekers and refugees, which prompted suspension from his profession as sports host with the government-funded broadcaster, Gary Lineker raises important questions.

When is speaking out against government policies that are contrary to accepted and adopted international law, that put people at extreme risk by forcing them into either persecution or destitution, and challenging the language designed to turn a public against an entire cohort of people, inappropriate, partisan or partial?

The answer is that there is a fundamental difference between calling out human rights abuse and being politically partisan. While there is confusion around whether Lineker is technically and legally an employee of the BBC, others are rightly expected to be politically impartial. But there is no “impartiality” on human rights abuse. How can one be impartial to the stoking of division and hate?

There is no such thing as taking a “neutral” approach to racism, to the marginalisation of groups, to hate speech. Human rights, independent of any party, politician or government, provide us with true neutrality.

Criticising policy that compounds these dangers is a duty we all hold. Otherwise, when does our profession start and our humanity end?

These are not new concepts to Australians, since we underwent the same process. We should be deeply ashamed that our own policies – that have cost billions and destroyed many lives – are now travelling the world and taking our reputation with it.

The Sunak government [in the UK] has copied Australia’s policy right down to the simplistic, diversionary slogan: Stop the Boats. Of course, it’s boats that must be stopped, rather than desperate humans in them.

Language has proven highly successful in numbing the Australian public to the reality of human mobility and suffering. To ensure that ordinarily caring Australians would turn a blind eye to suffering and death, it is fundamentally necessary to portray a group as unworthy, improper, criminal and dangerous. One must also take their identity and thereby their humanity by giving them numbers, ensure that no media can access them, even criminalise doctors who uphold their Hippocratic oath and call out the human cost, as Australia did with the Border Force Act of 2015.

It helps when the government lies to the Australian public about mothers throwing their children overboard, turning concern into revulsion, compassion into heartlessness. Thus, the legal act of entering another country when seeking safety must be called illegal. Immigration becomes border security. Regugee camps are given military designations such as Bravo and Delta, as though we are at war with innocent people.

Lineker pointed out that terms being used by the UK government ministers are “not dissimilar” to those of Nazi Germany. He is right. He did not compare the treatment of refugees with the 1930s but correctly pointed out that UK government rhetoric is changing to normalise the agenda of exclusion, hate and division.

. . . The support of Lineker’s colleagues in refusing to broadcast in his absence is exemplary, however, standing in solidarity with his right to champion human rights, while commendable, shouldn’t obscure the underlying issue that sparked the furore, the abuse of refugees themselves.

If legends such as former England internationals Alan Shearer, Ian Wright and Alex Scott stood against the demonisation of innocent people, the UK would have a powerful chance of avoiding the 20 years of harmful policy and thousands of lives destroyed, a period from which Australia is only now emerging.

And if the extraordinary outrage against a public figure who is challenging the policy and language of hatred was reserved for the mistreatment of refugees themselves, Britain, Australia and like-minded countries could commit to solving a complex and worrying escalating issue rather than attacking some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

– Craig Foster
Excerpted from “Gary Lineker’s Red Card from the BBC
Exposes a Shameful Contradiction”
The Sydney Morning Herald
March 14, 2022

The second worthwhile commentary on the Gary Lineker/BBC controversy that I share today is from English actor and comedian Tom Walker via his fictional political correspondent Jonathan Pie. (NOTE: During the following 4-minute video, Pie critiques the rhetoric of British Home Secretary Suella Braverman.)





See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Jeet Heer: Quote of the Day – March 10, 2023
• Demanding Justice and Embodying Compassion for Separated Families
• A Prayer for Asylum Seekers Being Tear-Gassed at the Border
• Jeremy Scahill on the Historical Context of the Trump Administration’s “Pathologically Sick” Anti-Immigrant Agenda
• “What We’re Seeing Here Is a Tipping Point”