James O'Brien apologises for his comments on LBC

James O'Brien issued the following apology yesterday.

“This is very important. At this time yesterday on the show, I read out a message from a listener called Chris, who said that his wife had been brought up in the Jewish faith and had attended what he described as a Shabbat school. He went on to make further claims about what he said she had been taught in that school.

“As with all the texts and messages that I read out on the programme, I did so in good faith, but the message has understandably upset a lot of people, and I regret taking those unsubstantiated claims at face value and am genuinely sorry for that, and it is very important that I get that out there. Thank you for your attention.”


The lesson we should all learn from this is that there is a lot of very nasty stuff out there and we all need to be very careful not to take unsubstantiated claims at face value.

The comments from "Chris" which Mr O'Brien read out were both clearly untrue (as there is no such thing as a "Shabbat school" in Hertfordshire where "Chris" alleged his wife had attended one or anywhere else in the UK) and likely to give offence to both Jews and Arabs.

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