Who does Uefa think it’s kidding? It says the huge banner saying ‘Stop killing children’ unfurled at a Super Cup match last night was ‘not political’. It was ‘about humanity’, insists an insider. ‘In fact, you could just say it is common sense’, they said. They must think we were born yesterday. Everyone whose moral faculties have not been entirely fried by the Gaza war knows this banner was likely a political dig at that state it is fashionable to hate – Israel.
The banner said ‘Stop Killing Children – Stop Killing Civilians’. It was displayed on the pitch in Udine, Italy ahead of the clash between Tottenham Hotspur and Paris Saint-Germain. Children from conflict zones around the world stood by the banner, including two Palestinian kids. Uefa’s rules forbid the display of political messages before, during or after matches. But this wasn’t political, it says – it was a cry of concern for littl’uns everywhere.
I call BS. I suppose it is wholly coincidental that such a banner has been displayed at a time when Europe’s chattering classes feverishly accuse the Jewish State of being a child-killing entity. Spend more than 60 seconds on social media and you’ll encounter this calumny. Browse the ‘respectable’ press and there it is. Venture into your city centre when there’s a ‘pro-Palestine’ march and you’ll hear the mob holler it: ‘Israel spills the blood of children!’
This view of Israel as a uniquely murderous state, as a nation that takes pleasure in the butchery of children, is all the rage right now. ‘Israel is annihilating Palestinian children’, op-ed writers cry. It is ‘targeting childhood’ itself, we’re told. A Unicef official described Israel’s war in Gaza as a ‘war on children’. It is no such thing, of course; it is a war on the neo-fascists of Hamas who invaded Israel on 7 October 2023 to rape and massacre Jews. Read on…
