‘It's open season on the Jewish community’ say protestors outside LBC office

The protesters were calling for action to be taken against James O'Brien (Image: Jamie Shapiro)[Missing Credit]

After the backlash, O'Brien apologised for any offence caused by his reading of the message, saying that he regrets taking the "unsubstantiated claims at face value". LBC took no further action. 

But a week later, activists urged the broadcaster to reconsider.

Taking up a large corner of Leicester Square, Jewish, Christian and secular campaigners were equipped with banners and both Union Jacks and Israeli flags. 

Bronstein himself however, wasn't shy at all in his criticism of O'Brien, telling the JC: "[The message] was blatantly antisemitic. I wrote to LBC and complained, and I got a fairly sterile response. I have told them that I am not listening to LBC anymore until something more concrete is done about O'Brien."

As the crowd grew larger and the first speaker prepared to go up onto the stand, Brody Mitchell, a student at Royal Holloway who, despite not being Jewish, wanted to make sure he was on the "right side of history" told the JC: "If you flip the narrative, if this was about someone from an Islamist upbringing as a Muslim child, I think everybody would be screaming out straight away.

"It is not on, and I think things like this really need to be called out. This is so important because nobody listens to us."

By the early evening, the protest was in full swing. Between speakers both Jewish and Christian, chants of "shame on you" and "get him out" rang out across the square. Beyond the sea of flags, a passing crowd of teenagers hurled abuse at the crowd and let out boos.

Around 250 protesters gathered outside the LBC office in Lecester Square on Tuesday evening (Image: Jamie Shapiro)[Missing Credit]

One demonstrator, Jan Bowman, who was handing out flyers from her predominantly Christian pro-Israel group, said: "[O'Brien] has [read] out this completely antisemitic thing about Jews being taught that Arabs are cockroaches last week and it is part of a pattern in the British media. It is just thoughtless antisemitism."

"Non-Jewish British people need to realise that Israel is fighting for civilisation against barbarism and it is on the front line and we should be applauding it," Bowman went on.

"I have been leafleting for nearly two years, and I've found that the majority of the British public is passively pro-Israel. It's just that they are passive — just as the Germans were in the 1930s."