This post is not really just about James O'Brien who is a presenter on radio station LBC and who often describes himself as a 'typical bleeding heart liberal'. The problem is that, like almost every other 'bleeding heart liberal', he feels that one of the worst accusations you can make against him is that he is an antisemite. So earlier this week he was ridiculing the fact that a listener had accused him of being an antisemite after he fiercely criticized Israel (something he does very frequently). He said this was ludicrous because many people in Israel criticised the country's government for similar things, so that's like calling them antisemites also.
This an an argument you hear all the time by people who say they are anti-Israel but not antisemitic. But there is a simple, and fundamental, flaw in their argument. They select Israel for criticism but ignore the other 180 countries in the world where offences far worse than what they accuse Israel of are committed. And, until O'Brien spends time criticizing all those other countries, there is only one explanation for his continued baiting of Israel (a country he knows absolutely nothing about) - and that is good old-fashioned antisemitism.
And what makes O'Brien's defence even more hypocritical is that he accuses everybody who highlights the horrors of Islamic terrorism or Sharia law of being an 'Islamaphobe'.
Postscript: More on O'Brien's antisemitism here, here and here in his own words is why he considers it ridiculous to call him an antisemite. Yet there is something very revealing in what he says there. He ridicules a listener who suggested the media was antisemitic for failing to report the 2012 terrorist attack at the airport in Bulgaria that killed 7 Israeli tourists. He says he "asked her what crimes commited in Bulgaria she could remember ever being reported at length in British newspapers. She didn't have an answer, obviously,.." So, O'Brien thinks it is normal for the British media not to report a major act of international terrorism at an airport in a European capital .... yet somehow he thinks it IS the business of him and the rest of the British media to comment every time permission is granted for somebody to build an extension on a home in the Israeli capital city....
See also:
More on O'Brien and his claims not to be an antisemite
Is ant-Zionism the same as anti-semitism?
Of course he's a Jew hating bigot. He's proud of it. He says he's proud of it.
ReplyDeleteI frequently email JOB correcting him on his anti-Semitic comments. He is now declaring on LBC he is a Zionist! Meaning he believes the Jewish people should have their own country. This ploy is to defect his thinly veiled anti-Semitic bias.
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