aking 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….
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