LBC recently announced that presenter Sangita Myska – formerly of BBC – would be leaving her show on the talk radio station. The announcement came two weeks after a heated interview she had with Israeli government spokesperson Avi Hyman concerning Iran’s attack against Israel on April 15.
While there’s been idle speculation over whether Myska’s departure was somehow connected to that interview, neither the presenter nor LBC’s parent company, Global Media, have commented on the matter. Moreover, if you watch the full nine minute exchange between Myska and Hyman, you’ll see that there was nothing particularly unusual about it in comparison with other Israel-Gaza related interviews on LBC. If LBC or their parent company was intolerant of presenters who strongly challenged Israel, you’d think that James O’Brien, whose hatred for the the Jewish state is clear to anyone paying attention, would have been axed long ago.
However, despite the dearth of evidence regarding the reasons for Myska’s removal, The Herald (of Scotland) went full-on conspiracy theory over the row.
On May 2, they published an article by Alasdair Ferguson titled “Sangita Myska to leave LBC amid speculation of Israel’s involvement”, which includes absolutely zero evidence of “Israel’s involvement” – as you can see by reading the piece. In fact, the only sentence in the entire article which mentions such accusations is this one.
Myska’s disappearance from LBC’s airwaves raised a lot of questions from listeners about Israel’s potential influence on the decision of her departure.
So, it seems that headline rests entirely on the unevidenced conspiratorial mongering of anonymous LBC listeners.
Evidently, that was sufficient for another Herald journalist, Jody Harrison, to go further down that rabbit hole. On May 3, his article “Was Sangita Myska taken off the air over LBC Israeli argument?”, was published. As with Ferguson’s piece, it included no evidence to back up the ‘speculation’ concerning possible Israeli influence over LBC’s decision.
However, that didn’t prevent someone at the Herald from illustrating the article with this antisemitic graphic:
Conspiracies suggesting Jewish or Israeli influence over Western media outlets is a common antisemitic trope. But, rarely if ever have we come across such a toxic calumny in the British media that wasn’t based on even the pretense of evidence. The New Statesmen’s notorious ‘Kosher Conspiracy’ cover story back in 2002 comes to mind – which they apologised for after widespread condemnation. Though even that image was designed to illustrate (deeply flawed) articles in the issue on the topic of the ‘Israel lobby’.
Today marks the 17 year anniversary of this low point in the history of the New Statesman. An episode that tells us a lot about the antisemitism crisis afflicting today’s Labour Party. pic.twitter.com/DbIT38UqzC
— James Vaughan (@EquusontheBuses) January 14, 2019
On Friday, we tweeted The Herald, asking if an editor reviewed and approved the racist image. Though we didn’t get a response, they deleted the photo the next day and replaced it with the following:
Though we’re glad they took it down, unlike the New Statesman in 2002, they’ve thus far failed to apologise or even note the revision.
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