Why is James O'Brien recycling an anti-Semitic lie?

Telegraph

5 days ago

What kind of person would unquestioningly believe that British Jewish children are taught that 'one Jewish life is worth thousands of Arab lives and that Arabs are cockroaches to be crushed'?
Step forward James O'Brien, LBC's prince of the bien pensant. Today, the radio presenter received a message from a listener calling himself 'Chris' who made these overtly anti-Semitic claims.
O'Brien apparently duly repeated them on air without so much as a how's your father, prefaced by the baffling statement: 'I'm fascinated by objectivity, which is why I'm going to read out this from Chris'.
The listener's message began by pointing out that 'warped views are not just an Israeli problem'. What? So it's OK now to smear an entire nation as holding 'warped views'?
The fact that this alone did not set off alarm bells in O'Brien's mind was worrying enough. Make such a claim about any other people and the author of How To Be Right would surely be the very first to cry racist.
But that was only the prelude. 'Chris' went on to extend this 'Israeli problem' to include Jews in this country as well as their cousins in Tel Aviv.
'My wife was brought up Jewish and at shabbat school in a leafy Hertfordshire town…' his message continued. Let's press pause again there.
For one thing, it just sounded phony. 'My wife was brought up Jewish'? Yeah, right. But the mention of a 'shabbat school' was hilarious. There is, of course, no such thing. Jews do not go to school on the sabbath.
These red flags also fluttered too high above O'Brien's head for him to notice. He continued to read out the message to his 1.5 million listeners.
Thus, middle Britain was treated, in O'Brien's honeyed tones, to Chris's claim that at 'shabbat school', his 'wife' had been introduced to the aforementioned bigotry towards Arabs. The fact that O'Brien at no point realised the nature of what he was reading is downright disturbing.
Let's make this absolutely clear. Of the 15 million Jews in the world, you'll be hard pressed to find any who holds such repugnant views of anybody, including Arabs. Attend any pro-Israel rally and you'll never hear anything like it. Especially not in Britain.
It is true that a handful of extremists, especially in Israel, sometimes chant disgraceful things about their enemies. Jews have their thugs and nutters just like any other people. But these are in the vanishingly small minority, like the BNP in Britain.
To suggest that this amounts to an institutional indoctrination, akin to the brainwashing in Gaza, is quite obviously an anti-Semitic lie. Obvious, at least, to anybody with common sense.
In concluding his shameful monologue, O'Brien intoned: 'Whilst young children are being taught such hatred and dehumanisation, undoubtedly on both sides, as Chris points out, then they will always be able to justify death and cruelty.'
He added: 'There is a danger, perhaps, that we only ever hear one side of the dehumanisation and propaganda.'
No, there isn't. Not everything has two sides, James. There is such a thing as right and wrong. Obviously Israel, being a real-life country in the real world, isn't perfect; obviously it has its own extremists and criminals, like every other state on Earth.
But to compare the Middle East's only democracy to Gaza, where every strata of society is poisoned with the toxic ideology of the death cult, is frankly abhorrent – let alone suggesting that British Jews are engaged in the same thing.
Think of the scenes on October 7, when the half-naked corpses of Jewish women were paraded through Gaza while mobs spat at them, jeered and beat them with sticks.
Could you imagine such a thing happening in Tel Aviv? Could you imagine Israelis cheering as children and the elderly were taken hostage? Of course not. But I wonder whether O'Brien can.
Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. In 2014 and 2015, the author of How They Broke Britain gave vast amounts of airtime to the bogus claims of the VIP sex ring based on testimony by Carl Beech, who was later imprisoned both for sex offences and for perverting the course of justice.
He later expressed regret. But in August last year, he caused outrage by praising a video on social media that blamed 'Zionist backers' for the Southport riots. He later claimed not to have watched the clip in full and condemned it.
A certain pattern is emerging here. As inexplicable as it might be, O'Brien has a huge listenership and more than a million followers on social media. LBC has removed the 'warped views' clip from the internet. For untold numbers of people, however, the damage has already been done.