Mick Hartley

Ah yes, that James O'Brien business. Charlotte Henry at the Spectator:

When the story of how the British media responded to the October 7 atrocities is told, there will be a number of villains. High up on the list will be James O’Brien. The LBC host is smugness personified most of the time, but gets even higher on his horse whenever Israel is the topic, which it is frequently. Obviously.

Things reached a new low this week. On Tuesday, O’Brien read out a text from someone called ‘Chris’. This person said his Jewish wife had, as a child, attended something called ‘Shabbat School’. There she was taught that one Jewish life was worth thousands of Arab lives and other racist, dehumanising concepts.

‘There is a danger perhaps,’ O’Brien said in his very serious voice, ‘that we only ever hear one side of the dehumanisation and propaganda processes.’

That's certainly true – though not perhaps in the way O'Brien meant.

The problem, of course, is that Shabbat School is not real. No Jew has, to my knowledge, ever even used the phrase ‘Shabbat School’.

Not of course that O'Brien would be interested in such details. Or would go to the trouble of checking, when presented with such a juicy piece of antisemitic bile that so happily echoed his own prejudices.

All this should have been an immediate red flag to both O’Brien and his producers. That it wasn’t appears to suggest how keen that show is to air things that are anti-Israel and, ultimately, anti-Jewish.

To make matters worse, the clip of O’Brien reading this message was pushed out on LBC’s official X channel. It was later removed, but by that point the damage was well and truly done.

A big-name host on national radio had aired a blood libel against the Jews, seemingly without questioning the information in front of him. That blood libel was spread on social media, where it was probably seen by more people than ever tuned into the original broadcast. It all puts Jews in the UK in danger at a time when simply sitting in a Kosher restaurant can be enough to get you harassed and attacked.

Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, told me: ‘These comments are absolutely vile and it beggars belief that they were read out on air when they are clearly false and obviously antisemitic.’

Reflecting on her personal experience, Pollock explained: ‘I attended a Jewish primary school, Hebrew classes as a child and was immersed in Jewish education. Not once did I hear such vile assertions about another group of people – and I have never heard of anyone else hearing it either. I cannot believe James O’Brien and LBC thought it appropriate to promote this hatred.’

Meanwhile, Andrew Gilbert, a vice president of leading communal organisation the Board of Deputies, called on O’Brien to be taken off air. He’s right. This should not have been a matter of ‘deputy heads will roll’, with his producers taking the flak. While they certainly have questions to answer, O’Brien is the ultimate arbiter of what gets read out on air and he should not have been allowed back on the radio the following day.

This being the UK in 2025, he was. Having avoided sanction, it wasn’t until nearly two hours into his show yesterday that O’Brien said sorry. The LBC host said he regretted ‘taking those unsubstantiated claims (in the text) at face value’. His apology is too little, too late.

Over the last twenty months, Jews have endured torrents of hatred from all manner of media outlets. We couldn’t even watch clips from a music festival without being bombarded with hate. This week was the nadir though. A well thought of and seemingly intelligent host read out, and took at face value, a message that would have made Goebbels proud. He then kept his job. It’s a disgrace.

I'm reminded of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children play, with that theme of Jewish children being taught to hate Arabs and to cultivate a sense of supremacy. This O'Brien case is a lot cruder, no doubt, but it's the same line, so enthusiastically pushed by anti-Israel activists. The irony is that the ideological indoctrination of children is exactly the other way round, with Gaza schools, courtesy of UNRWA, teaching children to hate Jews and to dream of martyrdom in the battle against them as their highest aim. Plus the fact that Arabs make up some 20% of Israel's population, which is some 20% more than the Jewish proportion of the population of Arab states….