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.
James O’Brien is smugness personified, but gets even higher on his horse whenever Israel is the topic
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.’
The problem, of course, is that Shabbat School is not real. No Jew has, to my knowledge, ever even used the phrase ‘Shabbat School’.
Jews do many things on a Shabbat – the day of rest observed from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday – including going to synagogue and visiting friends and family. They do not go to school.
Indeed, Jews are not meant to do anything resembling work on Shabbat, including writing, making teaching or attending classes rather difficult. Consequently, children mostly go for their Jewish education on a Sunday morning.
I remember attending these Cheder classes. We were taught by earnest, religious young women how to read Hebrew and about the festivals, but mostly we counted down the minutes until we could go home again.
Some more liberal denominations do now offer Jewish education on a Saturday morning, allowing parents to sit in the synagogue service undisturbed. Does it seem likely that those teaching in such communities would be comparing Arabs to cockroaches, as the nonsensical text message claimed was happening?
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.
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