Everyone frets about teen boys who are lured into the manosphere. I’m more worried about the grown-ass adults who have tumbled down the moral toilet of Israelophobia. At least the dim kids who hang on Andrew Tate’s every word have the excuse of being at the mercy of their own hormones. What excuse do the Gazaholic grown-ups have for gorging so ferally from the digital trough of anti-Israel bullshit?

Exhibit A: Gary Lineker. His grey matter has sizzled to a crisp on the bonfire of Israel-hate. Now he’s sharing posts likening Zionism to Nazism. He has been so radicalised by the anti-Israel slop that clogs up the digital highway that he’s echoing the vilest of all the anti-Zionist tropes – namely, that the Jewish nation has become the moral mimic of history’s most notorious Jew killers.

It was on his Instagram page. He reposted a speech by the anti-Israel nutjob, Tony Greenstein. Greenstein had been charged with inviting support for Hamas, which is a proscribed organisation in the UK. He was cleared at Kingston Crown Court last week. On the steps of the court, he let rip in his usual histrionic fashion against the Zionist project. ‘Zionism’, he squeaked more than thundered, ‘is in the tradition of the Nazis’. Imagine seeing such dribbling bigotry and thinking: ‘I should share that.’ That’s what Lineker did.

It gets worse. The Greenstein clip was posted by CAGE International, an iffy outfit that campaigns on behalf of Muslims affected by the ‘war on terror’. These are the weirdos who once called Mohammed Emwazi, also known as ‘Jihadi John’, a ‘beautiful young man’. He’s the British-Muslim traitor who trekked to Syria to become chief executioner for those sworn foes of our civilisation, ISIS. One of his victims was a British cabbie called Alan Henning, who’d gone to Syria to deliver food to the war’s victims. Emwazi sawed off his head on camera.

Are we going to talk about this? About the fact that Gary Lineker, footballer turned podcast impresario, for years one of the highest-paid talking heads at the BBC, is sharing a post from a group that said the Islamist butcher of ISIS had been a ‘kind, gentle’ soul? Worse, a post containing flagrant Holocaust inversion, where the Jewish homeland is grossly reimagined as the moral heir to Nazism? No? We’re just going to let it slide?

It is a testament to the virulence of Israelophobia, to its almost total conquest of the bourgeois mind, that stuff like this barely makes a ripple these days. There was a time when if a well-known public figure had hyped a CAGE post and platformed the noxious idea that the Jewish State is Nazi-like, people would have said: ‘Oh, what’s going on here?’ Not anymore. So thoroughly has polite society been colonised by bug-eyed anti-Israel animus that Lineker’s antics provoke no emotional response at all. Except perhaps haughty nods of approval.

Lineker has form. He parted ways with the BBC last year over what the press rather politely called ‘an anti-Semitism controversy’ – he had reposted a delirious rant about Zionism that was illustrated with a rat. Zionists as vermin? Classy. And then these people have the nerve to call others Nazis, despite their own giddy rehashing or reposting of the Nazi-era notion that Jews are the rodents of humanity.

Equating Zionism to Nazism is not clever political critique – it is raw, unadulterated bigotry. As the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance says in its working definition of anti-Semitism, it is racist to ‘[draw] comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’. Howard Jacobson said it best. There are untold wars from history that the Israel-Hamas War could be compared with, he said. The reason they compare it with the Holocaust is because their lowlife aim is ‘to wound Jews… to punish them with their own grief’. It’s Jew-shaming masquerading as pacifism.

Lineker sums up the commenting class’s pathological loss of moral proportion. The way these people talk, you’d think Israel’s pursuit of the Islamofascists of Hamas was the worst war of modernity, a ‘crime’ as racist and insane as the Nazis’. Yet Lineker himself is pals with a bloke – Alastair Campbell – whose political fabulism helped to launch a war in Iraq that on every moral metric was worse than what’s happened in the Middle East these past three years. I wonder if Lineker has ever called Al a rat-like killer of kids who’s not dissimilar to Hitler?

Lineker’s descent from dull but knowledgeable sports fella into the Zio-rat guy is proof that Israelophobia turns your mind to mush. The spotty kid who watches hours of Tate has nothing on these Boomers and geriatric millennials who brainlessly lap up every hyper-edited, context-free clip from Gaza as hard proof that Israel is a monstrous entity. This is real online radicalisation: the frying of a million middle-class brains by algorithmic bigotry and the moral pornography of war.

We are witnessing the great cognitive collapse of the Western liberal elite. A media establishment that once prided itself on scepticism and intellectual rigour now acts like an army of mind-wiped converts to a digital cult. Lineker and the rest of the Israel-wary class are not leading a moral awakening – they’re the latest victims of an internet ecosystem that rewards superficial emotionalism and punishes nuance. We need a Gazaholics Anonymous, stat.